


The Demise of the Polyphagic Man

by kittlery



Series: Sherlock Struggles with Cases and People [2]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Case Fic, Established Relationship, Horror, M/M, Paranormal, Sherlock rationalises everything, Sherlock-centric, Slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-04
Updated: 2015-02-04
Packaged: 2018-03-10 12:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 23,441
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3290687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kittlery/pseuds/kittlery
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three weeks after the events of The Killer with the Yellow Wall-Paper Sherlock finally finds something to occupy himself with other than flailing at his unresolved relationship with John. Unfortunately the case does not prove to be much of an improvement.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Demise of the Polyphagic Man

**Author's Note:**

> You can read the Voynich Manuscript [here](https://archive.org/details/TheVoynichManuscript).

The room was dark. The victim knew nothing and slept on peacefully. Sherlock stood above the bed, staring. He was a shadow, he was silence. He was bored to death.

“John,” he said. He wasn't going to be bored _alone_ , someone else had to suffer too.

John twitched in the bed, opened his eyes, and inhaled sharply in surprise. “How long have you been there?” he demanded crossly, the effect a little bit ruined by the sleepy timbre of his voice.

“I'm bored,” Sherlock replied, once again underwhelmed by John's performance. The man had been a soldier and it was this easy to sneak into his room while he slept and surprise him.

“Oh God,” John groaned and turned over. “Go away, Sherlock.”

That presented Sherlock with several choices, most of which were immediately discarded (leaving, giving up, being quiet, letting John sleep). John had a DUTY, and it was to amuse Sherlock.

Three weeks. Three painful weeks. No cases, limited movement, limited vocabulary (no apical consonants), boredom upon tedium, insult to injury, _et_ _cetera._ John had been _glad_ that there'd been such a lull. GLAD. It wasn't just incomprehensible. It was r _eprehensible._

“Stop grinding your teeth, I can hear it,” John muttered.

“Do you remember how you got into bed?” Sherlock countered, deciding that if he couldn't kill John (physically yes, emotionally no, which was already annoying), he'd at least taunt him.

“Yes,” John replied and after a moment sat up, giving Sherlock a highly suspicious look. “Why?”

“Oh, the dose was too low, then,” Sherlock faked a pout. He hadn't actually poisoned John (this time), but at least John would pay attention to him now.

“What. Dose.” John's nostrils were flared in imminent anger.

“What's the fun in telling?” Sherlock shrugged and examined his nails. John slept with a small red night-light plugged into a socket. It gave just enough light for things to be discernible, but naturally it didn't rob one of their night vision (and it didn't disrupt melatonin production).

John moved suddenly and though Sherlock caught the movement, he wasn't able to dodge out of the way completely, and the pillow John wielded hit him in the shoulder. “Next one's going to be something harder,” John warned him. “In fact, the next one might just be a god damn bullet.”

“Oh, for God's sake,” Sherlock snorted and sat on the bed without being invited to do so. He never got invited to do anything, really, so he'd learned the habit of not waiting for an invitation. “I didn't dose you with anything, I'm just bored. How can you still not see, feel or realise when you've been poisoned or drugged?”

“Maybe it's because my flatmate is a bag of dicks,” John snapped, but he was obviously relieved that he hadn't actually been drugged. Sherlock was able to see it in his posture and face and hear it in his voice.

“I'm bored,” Sherlock repeated then, lying down on the quite narrow bed next to John. The night was the worst time because everything went so quiet, except for the sirens and cars in the distance that he always wanted to go chase, just to see if it was something more interesting than a robbery or heart attack.

“Could you go be bored somewhere else?” John punched his pillow to fluff it up and then lay down, shoulder to shoulder with Sherlock.

What a ridiculous question. Obviously the answer was no, or Sherlock would BE somewhere else. “My turn to ask questions,” he declared. After all, he'd let John ask him. It wasn't his fault John had completely failed to ask anything _important_ or _interesting._

“Is it?” John muttered.

Sherlock steepled his fingers on his chest. “Tell me about the single most interesting event you witnessed or were part of in Afghanistan.”

“That isn't a question.”

“Don't be a pedant, John. Answer me.”

Sherlock could follow John's trail of thought even without looking at him. He didn't want to answer, but he hoped Sherlock would go away faster if he did. He considered lying, but realised Sherlock would know immediately. So he gave up. There was a (familiar) sigh of defeat.

John had tilted his head back on his pillow, eyes closed. “There was this one man,” he began, slightly hesitant. “He'd been hit by an IED, but he wasn't in critical condition, though his legs had been amputated. He was in the field hospital waiting for transport when my shift began. He'd been brought in and operated on during the shift previous to mine.”

So far none of this sounded in any way strange or new. “The point, John? Do you have one?”

“It was quite quiet that day, so I heard it over in the office when that man suddenly laughed. He'd been asleep just a few minutes earlier, so I got up to check on him and saw a man in civilian clothing bending over his bed, his back to me. No civilians in the base so I approached them and asked for the man to identify himself. He didn't make any reply and just walked out. I followed, but once I got out of the building I didn't see him anywhere. The layout of the base was very open and it was in the middle of a sunny day, and there was nowhere he could have gone in the few seconds it took for me to get out behind him.”

“So a man disappeared. That happens all the time.”

“I went back to the patient and he was still smiling. Cheerful, even. I asked him about the man and he said-” John paused and shifted. “He said the man was his grandfather, dead for the last seven years or so. He told me he'd just popped in to tell him that dying wasn't so bad and that he had family on the other side and not to be frightened. The man was on a morphine drip. I checked his vitals, everything was within normal limits, as far as the situation went, so I walked back to the office and called the MPs to tell them what I'd seen and gave the description of the man I'd seen as best I could. When I went out again, the soldier was dead in his bed. They'd missed the head trauma when he'd been brought in and he died of a cerebral oedema.”

The silence stretched as Sherlock absorbed the information. He, though often misunderstood in this particular area, didn't consider the paranormal or supernatural impossible. In fact, that was part of the misunderstanding; he didn't consider anything paranormal or supernatural. Explanations could be found, if one was intelligent enough to admit that the explanation could be something outside the norm.

He used his massive intellect to deduce what John would want to hear at this point. A concession he didn't usually make, but John was something outside the norm, as well.

“He died happy.”

And John, if anyone, knew what saying things like that cost.

“Thank you.” John glanced at him. His face was quiet.

That was John. More worried about losing a soldier than seeing a ghost. Or whatever people liked to call these energy manifestations that were clearly around, but yet people actively ignored them and denied their existence. The human mind was such a hive of paradoxes. It was fascinating.

“Go to bed now,” John said after a while.

“No.”

“Fine, then at least let me sleep.”

Sherlock refrained from making a reply of any sort in case he changed his mind about it later. This way he didn't need to justify anything. John hunkered down into his pillows and blankets with his back to Sherlock, which he counted as a victory because John hadn't kicked him off the bed and out of his room. He could get so territorial.

Like about his phone, which was right there, on the nightstand, recharging. Sherlock picked it up and bypassed the number lock easily. He'd not told John he knew it so he wouldn't change it. That treatment was reserved for the laptop (it was amusing to watch him try remember his latest password).

To pass the time Sherlock checked all the in- and outgoing numbers, latest text messages (a gratifying amount of them was from him), the email account that had been left logged in and all the tabs left open in the browser. Nothing particularly interesting or new (Harry had rang, he'd not rang back and there was a new number titled 'Lady at Deli', and he'd taken pictures of his breakfast and lunch and many other meals for some reason), except when he got to the news site and read the latest bulletin about a toddler going missing at a hospital. Not newsworthy in itself (to Sherlock), but the cause of his disappearance was suspected to be a man with slight mental retardation who could eat absolutely anything, and was presumed to have eaten the small child. And then walked out of the hospital. A picture had been added and anyone who saw him was requested to contact the police.

“John, where would a man, who can eat anything and is thus most likely always hungry, go?”

“Wha?”

“Exactly, the tip, let's go.” Sherlock got up.

John groaned, pulled his blanket over his head and didn't move.

“Oh for God's sake, where's your medical curiosity?” He ripped the blanket off John and took it downstairs with himself. How easily the man could frustrate him!

He got dressed, pausing only to check the news again, then ran back upstairs because John hadn't showed up. It turned out John was still in bed, curled up around his pillow, trying to keep sleeping. Sherlock wasn't going to let that happen. He went to John's closet and pulled out random clothes, throwing them at him.

“Get up, get up, get up,” he repeated. “It could be polyphagia!”

John did sit up, his face was drooping with lack of sleep and annoyance. Sherlock didn't see why John would be annoyed, he was the one who was refusing to be interested in something that hadn't been proven to exist in humans (polyphagia in animals had been connected to a damaged amygdala so in theory the same could work for humans).

“Remember he's human, remember it's wrong to kill humans...” John muttered while pulling on the shirt Sherlock had thrown on him.

“There should be a socially accepted reason for killing people,” Sherlock remarked, flipping his phone around and slipping it in his pocket.

“Yeah, there should.” John gave him a look. He was mad, clearly, but Sherlock ignored it. No time for that now. He trotted back downstairs, that pleasant tingle at the base of his spine which he connected with cases and generally non-boring things (sometimes even John).

It wasn't much of a case if an intellectually challenged man ate a child because there was no mystery. Outrage, yes (on the part of the regular person), but no mystery. The interest in this was obviously the medico-scientific angle of a person who could even eat a young child. It signified both psychological and physical issues, and Sherlock was in good cheer thinking about it. John on the other hand, when he came down, looked like death warmed over.

Sherlock didn't give him the time to protest and just swept him out the door and into the street, striding forth when no cabs were immediately available. John hurried after him, silent until the chilly night air (ostensibly) cleared his head.

“Where are we going?” he asked. Something Sherlock had been expecting.

“To the tip.”

“All right.” John accepted that for a moment, until another question bubbled up from the primordial ooze of his subconscious. “Why?”

Sherlock had expected this, as well. “Because if a man is always hungry and can eat anything he likes, where else would he go?”

“What?” John asked. Had Sherlock spoken in an unclear manner? He scanned back his words and decided they were informative enough to not clarify his stance.

After a moment though, to his surprise, John piped up again. And not with a question. “You're thinking about it wrong,” he said. A statement that caught Sherlock's attention because when was he ever wrong?

He didn't reply.

“A man that's always hungry would go to the nearest source of food, not the place where the amount of food was largest. I doubt he'd be able to think further than his next mouthful. I mean, if the situation was that dire.”

Sherlock had slowed his pace, and John was looking at him expectantly, waiting to hear the acknowledgement that he was right. A satisfaction Sherlock was loathe to part with. “Hunger doesn't preclude logic.”

They had stopped now. John had his collar turned up and his hands in his pockets. The tip of his nose was red and his hair was uncombed. His face was tired, but his eyes were bright. A fact Sherlock attributed to the street light, because people's eyes didn't brighten or dim on their own, no matter what centuries' worth of romantic novels said. People just saw reflections of their own emotions in other people's eyes, which was why it was best to stay emotionless. (There'd been no horror in the eyes of the Tuol Sleng prisoners who'd been photographed before torture and death under the Khmer Rouge regime.)

“How would you know?” John said finally.

“I know what hunger feels like,” Sherlock retorted. He was NOT amused by John's use of that line (though it most likely was not intentional _but that was beside the point_ ).

“You're _never_ hungry.” John shook his head. “You eat because you have to, but you're not hungry.” The way he said it made him sound disappointed, as though Sherlock had failed some secret test that defined his humanity. Or, as was more likely, his lack of humanity.

“I see,” Sherlock drew himself up. It always came to this. He'd thought John at least was over it. Apparently not. He was a machine, inhuman freak, cold and-

“Stop it,” John's voice cut through his thoughts. He reached forward and grasped Sherlock's arm, squeezing it, just above the wrist. “I know what you're thinking and it's human to be different,” he even smiled (which surprised Sherlock, considering the circumstances).

“How could you possibly kn-”

“You're not a machine, you're human, I've seen you. It's okay to care even if your twat of a brother tells you otherwise. You're quite good at hiding it, really, but I've become quite good at spotting it. Sometimes you annoy the hell out of me, like the bag of dicks you are, but you're not a freak and you're not a machine.”

Sherlock stared, then scoffed. “I don't need you to tell me what I'm thinking.”

“No?” John seemed smug (why was he smug, what did he have to be smug about, he was absolutely wrong wrong WRONG, Sherlock liked being misunderstood). “Some people don't care about food is all I'm saying,” John looked at him. No, more than _at_ him, _into_ him (why was he doing this).”I just wanted to you to consider that someone who was compulsively hungry might think differently.”

It... made sense. So of course Sherlock just wrinkled his nose, huffed, and turned to keep walking. John let go of his arm and followed, but radiated a field of 'deal with it' and Sherlock knew even without turning back to look that John's face would be saying the same (why was his stupid face always saying things).

“Shut up!” Sherlock snapped, annoyed by the thought of John's face saying things. Usually John was not a problem on his radar, he could make himself disappear (perhaps he could STOP THINKING), but right now he was a giant issue (and his STUPID FACE).

His furor was derailed by his phone.

“What!” he demanded as he answered it. He'd been able to tell from the way his phone groaned under the weight of the ringtone that it was his brother without looking at the screen. “Where's the spycam now?”

“If there was one, would I reveal it's location?” Mycroft sounded vaguely amused. “There's something you could do for me.”

“No!” Sherlock turned and shoved the phone at John, who took it with raised eyebrows and lifted it to his ear.

“Hello, Mycroft,” he said. At least he'd picked up some deductive skills along the way, having been able to tell from Sherlock's (rather transparent) replies who'd just rang him. “So you have a new spycam on us?”

Sherlock paced and listened. His hair hurt. He had a phantom headache in all those parts of his brain that he'd excised to make room for his deductions. The one that was supposed to store social schemas particularly.

“Really? That's interesting,” John said into the phone, looking at his cuticles while he spoke. He must have known how that irritated Sherlock. Not the cuticles, but the fact he didn't know what Mycroft was saying. WHAT was interesting?! Was it really interesting or was it small talk interesting? Was John doing it on purpose. No, of course not, he didn't have the capacity to dual-process like that.

“I'll see what I can do,” John continued, glancing up from his hand at Sherlock.

“No!” Sherlock protested immediately. “Whatever he wants, we're not doing it!”

“Yeah, he doesn't want to do anything,” John agreed to the phone. “You know, I've been wondering why you keep ringing us up when you need someone to do your mobile work. Is this some weird way of trying to stay in Sherlock's life?”

“OF COURSE it is,” Sherlock snapped immediately. “Stop trying to psychoanalyse his twisted idea of familial duties and hang up!”

“Rii-ight.” John rolled his eyes. “Why don't you get some secret service lackey to do that thing you wanted us to do? Yeah, bye.” John handed the phone back to Sherlock. “Happy now?”

“Ecstatic.”

“Do you want to know what he said?”

“Is there any way I can stop you from telling me?” Sherlock muttered, glaring at his phone. It might be time to change his number again. It'd take Mycroft at least an extra five minutes to ring him then.

“I can think of a few ways,” John said under his breath.

“What?”

“What?” John smiled innocently. He was very good at that. He could just turn on some sort of a generator in his face that made him radiate innocence and kindness and relatability.

“Oh, I see. Innuendo,” Sherlock said with barely controlled superiority, but John spoke over him.

“A haunting,” he said. “Mycroft wants us to see a man about a haunting in his house. Well, a corpse inside a locked room.”

“That doesn't mean a ghost did it,” Sherlock scoffed.

“Your brother thinks it was a ghost.” John was amused. Mirthful, even.

“My brother is a fat cake-thief,” Sherlock muttered. John looked like he thought he had the upper hand, like he'd managed to distract Sherlock from the man who could eat everything. He hadn't. Sherlock had a very expansive mind capable of holding several facts, trails of thought and centres of attention at the same time. “You don't believe in ghosts which is why you're amused.”

“No, I don't really,” John agreed. “And yes, that is the reason. I didn't know you did.”

Sherlock continued walking, having adjusted his route to head to the hospital instead of the tip. “You've seen an inexplicable phenomenon in Afghanistan, with the dying man. Most people say seeing is believing.”

“I saw a lot of inexplicable things in Afghanistan,” John replied, following him. “Out of which the man was only one. The cruelty of war is far more-”

“Yes, yes,” Sherlock interrupted, and then he was interrupted by John's phone playing its insipid ring tone.

John gave him a look ('This is not over, Sherlock') and answered. “Hello, Mycroft. How can I help you? Again?”

Sherlock rolled his eyes and turned on his heel to continue walking. He seethed as he went, and deliberately did not listen to anything John said as he spoke with Mycroft. It was all a bait, was Mycroft purposefully trying to tempt him with a locked-room murder? Did that mean he had an interest in the polyphagic man? Was Sherlock reading too much into Mycroft's rather timely interest in some (probably) random murder? Despite appearances he did consider Mycroft to be very clever and nothing was beyond him. He was in a position in the world where he could do anything (moral or immoral, if he had any belief in a system of morality) to further his agenda, or the agenda of those people above him in the food chain. Hah, food chain.

“John!” Sherlock said, turning. John was still on the phone. “Ask _him_ where a man who's always hungry would go.”

John snorted and did that, then soon put his phone away. “He wasn't amused,” he reported, grinning a bit.

Sherlock grinned back, and then kept on his course toward the hospital. Perhaps if he'd heard of the murder from anyone else but Mycroft he'd been interested. Perhaps he could send a discreet text to Lestrade and ask about it. Yes. As he was typing a text with his usual economy of words _(Locked_ _room._ _Corpse._ _Info.)_ he received another text, from Molly. She had the corpse of the man who was suspected of eating the toddler. He had been found dead not far from the hospital.

“Aha!” Sherlock said out loud. “Come on, John!”

-

Despite Molly's desperate and obvious longing to her childhood she had an eye for the sort of peculiarities that interested Sherlock. Sherlock suspected she'd originally cultivated this talent for spotting said peculiarities because of her crush on him, and while she no longer (openly) longed for him, that talent had remained. She opened the door for them once they arrived and then looked away when Sherlock's gaze landed on the make-up she wore. It clearly wasn't for the occasion of meeting Sherlock (and John by extension) at the mortuary at 1am. She only wore that colour lipstick when she expected to be intimate. So her plans for the evening had fallen through.

“He's not going to leave his wife for you,” Sherlock said at once, brushing past her. “They never do.”

“He's not like that,” she said a bit quietly, but loud enough for John to hear as well as he stepped past her into the corridor leading to the mortuary.

“Lestrade's just as much a man and a human being as anyone else and a product of this society. Thus he follows certain cultural and social guidelines and patterns discernible to the eye of someone who knows where to look,” Sherlock kept talking as he went down the corridor. John hadn't probably known about Molly and Lestrade and was currently and undoubtedly asking questions about it from her as someone interested in their fellow man would. Sherlock ignored whatever noise they were making behind him because it was unnecessary and uninteresting and strode into the mortuary proper.

He spotted the corpse Molly had called him in for immediately. It was hard to miss a dead man with skin covered in tattoos and a severed (extra) hand poking out from the opened ribcage area of it. Molly had stopped in the middle of her autopsy to text him. John also approached the autopsy table, frowning.

“Is that- That's his esophagus?” he asked, glancing at Molly who nodded and then shrugged to say that she didn't know why it looked like that. Sherlock gave it a glance, noticing how large and distended it was, just a pipe straight into the stomach.

Sherlock grabbed a latex glove and went ahead to peer into the body cavity. “When did this one come in?”

“Ah...” Molly grabbed a file and flipped through the few pages in it. “Looks like it was logged in at 12:17pm, so about forty-five minutes ago. I- I wasn't here. I was-”

“Yes, yes, waiting for Lestrade who didn't show up.” Which could be because Sherlock had texted him to look into the locked-room business. Oh well.

John had also leaned closer and was sniffing at the air above the chilled corpse. “Smells like open sewage,” he muttered. “Not like a healthy dead man.”

The description made Sherlock's lips twitch a little in amusement and look upon John fondly. “Bit of an oxymoron, don't you think,” he murmured but not maliciously by any means. John looked up and rolled his eyes. Molly had also crept closer, but she didn't bother Sherlock at the moment.

“This is the man, isn't it?” John said. “The polyphagic one.”

“What tipped you off?” Sherlock looked at John again, carefully picking up the hand from the opened esophagus. It was his deduction also, from the abnormalities in his gastrointestinal tract. The rest of him seemed fairly normal, or within normal limits. He always liked to hear what other people could deduce, John in particular. Most people didn't even try when he asked, knowing they'd most likely be met with derision when Sherlock told them they were absolutely wrong (but then they always were wrong, it wasn't his fault they were utter idiots).

“The hand,” John said. “He seems to have... chewed on it a bit so I think that probably means he, er, he was trying to eat it.”

Sherlock had arrived at the same conclusion. He picked up the hand and put it on a stainless steel tray, then brought it to another operating table to study.

“I'm going to need that, so please don't take it with you,” Molly said quietly, though she did nothing to stop him and she wouldn't stop him even if he actually did take it.

He brought the hand under a lamp. It'd been cut at the wrist, below the joint where the radius and ulna connected to the smaller bones of the palm. It was a very neat cut, but obviously surrounded by the trauma of having been cut while the victim was still alive. The fingers were curled into a fist, artificially so, since there was no muscle tension. A key ring had been slipped around the middle finger, so there was most likely a key held in the fist. It was a left hand. Short nails, something black under the thumb nail, ink stains on the visible on the skin, no signs of struggle.

“Need to analyse this,” Sherlock muttered, pointing out the substance under the nails to John, then he tried to open the fist. “I think the hand's glued shut.”

“Uh huh,” John nodded, not looking. “How did he force that hand down his throat?” He was looking at the man's face. “His mouth's torn at the corners, I guess that's how. He choked to death because he couldn't swallow it. That's a terrible- a terribly specific way of dying. Choking to death on a severed hand. How did he even come across it?”

Sherlock was listening, even if only partially, but sometimes John could spot something interesting. Sherlock considered John something of a prism, light went in one way, a rainbow came out the other way (no homosexual implications meant), he was an array of options and viewpoints and now indelibly attached to Sherlock's methods.

“John,” Sherlock said while working with acetone to undo the glue (usually not recommended for removing glue from skin, but the hand was already dead (the man who had previously possessed the hand—no idea), what harm could it do at this point). He'd taken a seat and had Molly hovering nearby, quiet though radiating worry and uncertainty. It was annoying. “Can you check what's in his stomach? And Molly, it's late, I could use caffeine. About 200 millilitres will do. Two sugars.”

They both hesitated, John because he didn't want to mess up official evidence and Molly because she wanted to tell them to stop. For a few seconds neither of them moved so Sherlock had to look up at them. “What?” he demanded. “Hurry up.”

Sherlock had moved the hand under a water tap, letting warm water on it, helping the glue loose with a scalpel. Despite his desire to know if there was a key inside the fist, he didn't wish to mutilate the hand beyond recognition. There could be any number of things he still needed from it. After a moment he became aware of Molly continuing her autopsy of the polyphagic man and the fact that John had gone. He looked up and around.

“He went to get the coffee,” Molly said. “He said you wouldn't mind if I did this instead. Since it's my autopsy.” The last was added in a defensive mumble, but at least it was added. There had been a time when she wouldn't have dared, or not wanted to go against Sherlock's wishes. He only shrugged. What did he care who got the coffee and who opened the stomach.

The hand was beginning to lose its grip on its Schrödinger's key. (Was there one? Wasn't there one? What a simplified look at quantum physics and thought experiments.) Sherlock forgot about the coffee and the corpse (though he was sure he'd seen those tattoos somewhere) and carefully peeled open the dead fingers to reveal a... key. Sherlock stared at it, laying in the palm of the severed hand. A small key with a round top, with a number etched on it (2C 027). It was a padlock key, or a locker key.

Lockers. The British Library had lockers in its cloakroom, but they emptied the lockers every day. Excess Baggage ran left luggage services at select train stations and airports, but they used a ticket system, not keys. Sherlock pulled the key ring off the finger carefully, dangling it in the air under the light.

Then, because the olfactory sense was so powerful, the smell of machine coffee seeped into his brain and woke him up. He blinked at the styrofoam cup that had appeared in front of him on the table, then turned to look at Molly and John who had clearly returned standing by the body, peering into the stomach of it.

“Any more body parts?” Sherlock asked. The scandalous news report had suspected the polyphagic man of eating a toddler at the hospital. One could only hope.

John looked up, holding a little basin for Molly to empty what hadn't been digested yet into it. “No, but a rat. Wonder how he caught it.”

Molly was pulling out an almost whole rat from the guts of the man. It hadn't been there for long. Sherlock got up to come see, prodding the dead rodent once it had been placed in the basin.

“He swallowed it whole,” he declared gleefully. “The neck isn't broken, there's no wounds anywhere.”

“Maybe he just found a dead rat,” John replied, rolling his eyes a little. “Easier to catch.”

“I can catch a rat,” Sherlock huffed. “And a fish with my bare hands. It's just patience and sleight of hand.”

“Of course it is,” John muttered as Sherlock turned to take off his gloves and grab the coffee, ignoring John's comment. The coffee was disgusting, but he drank it anyway, staring at the hand and the key on the table.

“Who cares? It's a whole rat I just found in a man's stomach. That's disgusting,” Molly said suddenly (surprisingly), not having been able to dredge up anything else interesting from the stomach of the corpse. Then she continued with something actually unusual: “I think I recognise the tattoos.”

“Oh, really? You've seen this stuff before?” John said, and Sherlock listened to them though he made no outward sign of it.

“Yeah... I think so,” Molly hedged. “In a different format. You know the Voynich manuscript?”

“No, never heard,” John replied, but he sounded mildly interested and Sherlock could imagine (because his back was turned and he couldn't see) the way his head tilted and his eyes gazed at Molly, displaying his interest and ability to connect to people, two things that made John such a prime target for human engagement.

But then Sherlock stopped listening. His mind palace booted up and he stared off into his own brain, looking for the Voynich manuscript. He sort of knew where to look (by the unsolved cases hall of fame, in the interesting objects cabinet) and shortly located the Voynich manuscript. It was an illustrated codex from the early 15th century, from northern Italy, written entirely in a language no one could decipher, filled with diagrams in several subjects _(exempli_ _gratia,_ herbal, pharmaceutical, cosmological).

“That's unusual,” John commented, his voice cutting through Sherlock's mind haze because it was nearer than he expected. “Look, it's on Wikipedia.”

Oh. Yes. Of course.

“What?” John looked up from his phone.

“Did I say something?” Sherlock sipped at his coffee, looking away. He could've just Googled the manuscript like John had done.

It was true the patterns on the man's skin bore some similarity to some of the diagrams in the manuscript, and there were words, too, which weren't any language Sherlock knew, so it was possible they were also from it. But what did it mean? The key, the death, the tattoos, it wasn't a coincidence. Just because (normal) people weren't able to see the causal relations between events didn't mean there weren't any.

“What do you think of this?” Sherlock picked up the key and showed it to John, who peered at it and shrugged.

“That was in the hand?” he asked (unnecessarily, because it was obvious). Sherlock didn't reply, but looked the object over again. It was so familiar. He waved his hand at John, making a “bzzz“ sound to make him go away. He needed to go back into his mind palace. Minute details like key shapes associated with certain padlocks or lockers or doors were not easy to recall. Even though in theory the mind retained everything seen and read, it didn't do so consciously, so Sherlock's mind castle limited to things he had paid attention to and committed to memory. There were a lot of those things, but it wasn't everything.

When he reconnected his conscious mind with his senses again he found himself back home. He was on his back on the sofa, still wearing his greatcoat and gloves and scarf, staring at the familiar ceiling. The flat was silent, the street lights shining through the windows indicated it was still night time (the same night) and a glance at his wristwatch confirmed this. He patted his pockets, locating his phone and the key (wallet, home keys, those didn't live in his pockets).

It wasn't that he was completely unaware of what happened around him when he was mind-palacing, but it was that he chose to ignore those things. He was gifted with great powers of compartmentalisation and concentration on top of his ability to deduce and memorise and then remember. So he was peripherally aware John had taxied him home from the mortuary and that Molly had given him a preliminary autopsy report (she did all these illegal things). Molly was good at what she did and Sherlock appreciated that. He appreciated that she didn't try to figure out motives from what she discovered, she only recorded those discoveries as objectively as she could and left the detective work to Sherlock (or, God forbid, Scotland Yard).

This was all in avoidance of the matter at hand, however, that being the key. Sherlock hadn't been able to recall any particular place or use for it. He scanned the sitting room despondently until his eyes fell on the London A to Z, which sparked a realisation that travelled up his spine and exploded in his brain like a firework.

“John!” he yelled, leaping up off the sofa. “ABC Selfstore!” He dashed forward and grabbed the nearest laptop, tearing it open. “They still use keys for their storage units!”

Only silence followed, or rather, the absence of a reply from John, not true silence, since that could never happen. What people conceived as “silence“ was in fact just lack of human-created noise pollution. Sherlock took the laptop and ran upstairs, ignoring John's closed door and lack of on-switched lights in his room.

“John.” Sherlock hopped onto the bed, making the lump under the covers jump. “ABC Selfstore, they have three locations in London and two of them are 24-hour accessible. Was Molly going to run the hand's fingerprints, or have someone else do it? When?”

John's arm shot up from the covers and slammed around Sherlock, forcing him to lie down. He did, out of surprise.

“Shut. Up,” John growled. “And sleep. Dickface.”

Sherlock snorted. “Dickface? Really? And sleep? I'm not going to s-”

He was cut off by John grabbing a pillow and forcing it over his face. Sherlock didn't struggle because John wasn't pressing the pillow down very hard and he could easily breathe. It was an interesting situation to be in. Was John insinuating Sherlock could sleep there, with him? And if given the choice, would he sleep there? He wasn't sure. John's bed wasn't very spacious and he liked space. John had relaxed, obviously having fallen back asleep, leaving Sherlock to consider the situation alone (as usual).

He took off the pillow and put it under his head and closed the laptop. John's arm was still across his chest, and he was still wearing his coat. Well, he'd slept in worse conditions (his room had been next to Mycroft's, after all) so this should pose no problem.

It was more surprising this happened due to John's initiative, considering John's stance on their currently very stagnant relationship was to keep it stagnant. Sherlock professed to some disappointment over that fact because he'd made his romantic and/or sexual overtures in the hope that John would pick it up from there, but it hadn't happened. Was three weeks too short a time to expect progress? Sherlock had laboured under the impression that new (romantic) relationships progressed faster. There were a number of reasons why he'd left it up to John, however. Like his oddly serious take on his heterosexuality, and his self-professed knowledge of relationships (though merely of the above-mentioned heterosexual variety).

John was a very great believer in Truth. But Truth didn't exist (truth is seen as truth because that is how human discourse is framed through power relations, and that is how it is lived and internalised, something called the “obviousness of obviousness“, which Sherlock rather liked), and trying to convince John of this type of existential fact when it came to his clearly strained relationship with his own sexuality was painstaking.

Creating meaningful connections to people was difficult, and Sherlock was surprised at how gratified he was by his connection to John, despite John being what one would term a 'normal' human being. This was the reason why he was at least trying to be patient with him and his struggles with the non-existent truth of his sexuality.

But none of that was really the problem. Lying there Sherlock could only think of two things: 1) he wanted John, 2) he wanted interesting cases. Not necessarily in that order. Or even separately. He had both of those things to a degree, but not to the degree he wanted them. The fact remained that he loved being obsessed and John allowed him that, even when it came to being obsessed with John. Even when it came to being obsessed with cases first.

He watched John fall back asleep, then got up and went back downstairs, leaving the laptop and undressing for bed. Operating under a sleep deficit was about as bad as being drunk, and he knew from past experience that he didn't do his best work when drunk. But then instead of sleeping he played his violin for the skull, thinking about the case.

Most importantly, why had the man tried to eat the hand? Why was the hand glued shut with a key in the palm? Why had it been cut off in the first place? Whose hand was it? Why did this polyphagic man have it? Where had he gotten it?

And the key itself. Where did it lead? If it was for a storage unit, what was in it that needed to be hidden? To be eaten away? Was it something valuable or something dangerous? (Both?) Did the man who had eaten it have anything to do with it? It wasn't a coincidence, it rarely was. John was a great proponent of coincidence and undoubtedly he'd suggest that as soon as he woke up. Or as late as he woke up.

-

“Tea's up,” was the next thing Sherlock became aware of. He was still on the sofa, and John was standing by him, holding out a cup of tea. “I think the man wasn't forced to eat that hand, he ate it because he was hungry. That's why he left the hospital in the first place, yeah?”

“Did Molly ring?” Sherlock asked instead of acknowledging John's hypothesis and sat up to accept the cup of tea.

“No, why?” John went to sit in his chair, picking up the paper which he must've fetched earlier. How much earlier? How long had Sherlock slept? For God's sake, it was almost noon.

Sherlock had kept up with updates on the autopsy until he'd fallen asleep. Molly was rather good at what she did (but no one tell her) and she had been able to text Sherlock or send him pictures of what she'd found or not found during the night. The man hadn't eaten a toddler any time in the last 24 hours. Pity.

“About the corpse,” Sherlock grumbled. What did John mean 'why?'

“No. Don't you think she deserves some rest?” John gave him a look over his paper.

“Don't you think a mystery deserves to be solved?” Sherlock made a face at him and got up. He needed a shower and then they needed to get to the storage facility. Depending on what was there they'd return to look over the autopsy report. “Doesn't matter, we need to move onto the selfstore.”

“Oh, I see,” John said calmly. “The corpse has already been opened so it's not interesting any more, but the storage locker hasn't and it's bothering you.”

It was unnervingly right, but Sherlock had to (grudgingly) admit that prolonged co-habitation usually led to some degree of intimacy between said co-habiters, in this case himself and John. Not to mention their shared interests in adrenaline-related activities. So naturally John would be able to deduce his motives on occasion, undoubtedly aided by his uncanny ability to _care._

Sherlock swept out of the sitting room and into the bathroom where he gave himself a shower, leaning out of the spray of water now and then to sip at his tea which he'd brought along. It was hot now, so he would drink it now.

The shower and the tea combined in a pleasant effect of heat, relaxing muscles he hadn't realised were still tense from spending the night on the sofa. He dressed halfway, leaving his sleeves rolled up as he rejoined John in the sitting room and held out his arm on the arm of his chair after sitting down.

“Patches,” he said and stared at John until he sighed and put the paper away to fetch the packet before coming over to stand by Sherlock's chair.

The paper at the back of the nicotine patch rasped when John drew it off (after having spent half a minute trying to get his blunt fingernail under the edge of it). Sherlock had watched the procedure with a mixture of frustration and affection, but now he sighed and wiggled his fingers impatiently. He stuck his arm, anterior side up, into John's grasp.

“Two,” he said.

“No,” John replied, glueing the patch on the inside of Sherlock's wrist.

“Three,” Sherlock insisted (it might have worked, John could be worked into a state of confusion with conflicting statements).

“NO.” John looked up, a furrow between his brows. “One.” He reached up and pressed his fingers under Sherlock's ears, feeling along his jawline for swollen lymph nodes.

“But my mesolimbic pathway,” Sherlock tried, tilting his head back. His lymph nodes were fine, but John refused to take his word for it and moved to palpitate under his arms.

“Erectile dysfunction,” John countered, working his way down Sherlock's sides with a look of concentration.

“Don't mirror your insecurities on me,” Sherlock huffed, arms stretched above his head.

“Just because you're not afraid of it, doesn't mean it can't happen,” John retorted calmly. “Show me your tongue.”

Sherlock sat up with slow insolence born of years in public schools and family dinners and stuck out his tongue, which was still somewhat misshapen from being bit and stitched back together three weeks earlier. John rubbed his hands with anti-bacterial handwash before taking Sherlock's tongue between his fingertips and pressing gently under it and along the little ridge that had formed where the stitches had been.

“Do we need to talk about incentive salience?” John let go of his tongue and sat back on his heels, looking up at him.

Sherlock sunk back into his chair, legs spread around John who was on the floor in front of him. “No,” he muttered and smacked his lips to get rid of the lingering taste of antiseptic, and tried another confusion tactic by pushing his foot between John's legs and up against the inside of his thigh.

“You're the one who brought up the mesolimbic pathway.” John pushed Sherlock's foot away and stood up. “The amount of nicotine patches you use has gone up and you keep wanting more.” He pocketed the packet of patches.

“I've an addictive personality.” Sherlock made a face because it was annoying when John was right.

“Don't make that face,” John said. “And what you have is a dick personality.”

Sherlock snorted. “That isn't even a thing.”

“You've made it a thing.” John rolled his eyes, but then he smiled (his shoulders relaxed, his fingers uncurled, the line between his brows softened). “Sherlock.”

John liked to look at him. It was just as well. Sherlock liked to look back.

John moved, slowly (like a glacier, or a tectonic plate), and bent down to kiss Sherlock on the upper lip. Then he pulled away. “Sorry,” he muttered, looking like he'd been caught with the last Jaffa cake while knowing very well that it was always reserved for Sherlock.

“One and a half?” Sherlock said, to which John snorted and made sure the nicotine patches were still in his pocket and not stolen by Sherlock.

“No. Breakfast?” John turned to go and Sherlock let him. When John had glaciered his way way into the kitchen, Sherlock touched his fingertips to his lips for a moment. He didn't remember falling asleep on the sofa, which bothered him a little.

Sleeping was a skill and Sherlock wasn't very skilled at sleeping. For years he had assumed everyone slept like he did, or rather, didn't sleep. Everyone went to bed and then spent two to four hours rolling around in abject misery*, didn't they? (*Misery, mis-er-y, _noun,_ boredom and the inability to do anything about it; a brain full of snakes eating their tails, refusing to let the sufferer fall asleep.) It had turned out they didn't.

He was staring at the dust swirling around in the light of the morning when a noise penetrated his introspective shell and his eyes caught movement in his vicinity. Mrs Hudson stood in front of him with her hands on her hips.

“Sherlock,” she said. “There's someone at the door for you.”

“Let them in,” Sherlock said, wondering why Mrs Hudson hadn't gone to John with this. John was the user interface.

She clucked her tongue at the state of their kitchen (so there'd been experiments, which John refused to clean up) as she went back downstairs. Her soft steps were replaced by the sharper thud of high heels on the carpeted stairs as the client more or less charged upstairs, sobbing monstrously. Her face had run past her cheeks and down her chin in streaks of black and orange. Oh. No. Just in in black, her _face_ was actually orange. Spray tan. Her lips were pale and her hair was a platinum mess of over-stressed strands, and she was dressed weather inappropriately in a short skirt and heeled boots and a jacket that was as puffy as her eyes.

“My friend's been sold to white slavery!” she said as soon as she saw Sherlock, then burst into fresh tears. John was stood in the doorway to the kitchen with a piece of toast in one hand and jam jar in the other, giving Sherlock and the new client a perplexed look.

“Impossible. For that to happen she'd actually have to be white and not _orange_ ,” Sherlock replied with a roll of his eyes, catching John's wince in his peripheral vision (what, the girl was _orange)._

The young woman had thrown herself on the sofa, crying very unattractively Sherlock thought and obviously oblivious to his comment about the disgusting colour of her skin. John put the toast and jam away and came into the sitting room. 'Be nice to the client,' his face was saying, and Sherlock hoped his face was registering his contempt of the concept of _nice_ in response to that.

But John ignored his opinion and went to the sofa, patting the crying girl's shoulder awkwardly. “Er, miss..?”

“Jaz,” she sobbed and looked up. John was moved enough to offer her the box of tissues (or socially pressured enough). “E- everyone calls me Jaz.”

She worked in a salon. A hair salon, a nail salon, a tanning salon, a beauty salon - one of those. A salon. Different types of salons had their tells, but Sherlock was not an expert (he would happily admit to it, even) and many of them had a mix of above services, making telling them apart even more arduous. She had blonde hair extensions but her hair was naturally dark, her facial features suggested Indian descent. Her accent suggested West London. Her nails suggested fakeness (but expensive, gel-tipped, flawless French manicure fakeness).

John was doing some of that human stuff with her, asking if she needed... something. Sherlock wasn't listening. He'd steepled his fingers in front of himself, leaning his elbows on the arms of the chair. How could he get rid of the girl as fast as possible so they (himself and John) could go see about the selfstore? He could just get up and leave, but John had just given him a kiss (first one John had ever initiated) and he was inclined to be good to him for now.

Sherlock tuned back in when the girl had managed to clean her face though it remained a ghastly orange which Sherlock suspected would fluoresce under an UV light. He was half-tempted to get his blue-light lamp, but John cleared his throat and tapped his pencil against his notepad.

“White slavery,” Sherlock said loudly, startling the girl who'd been sobbing unquietly. “Please enlighten me about your friend's situation.”

She dug in her purse, sniffling, and though the purse was tiny, it took her an inordinate amount of time to find whatever it was she was looking for (probably her mobile, or was she going to illustrate the story with her lip gloss?). Sherlock had often considered a small experiment in purse space as it seemed that they were bigger on the inside, but obviously that was only a perception and couldn't be verified without an empirical study of some sort. However, he'd never been bored enough to undertake said study. It was a horrifying thought that one day it might happen. He glanced at John and made a face at him, which John fortunately was able to decipher.

“Do you need a hand?” John asked the girl, reaching towards her, but that was when she pulled out her mobile. It was also pink and set with rhinestones. A small object on a piece of cord was attached to it, and it seemed to be in the shape of a tiny high-heeled shoe.

“It- it's all in there,” she sniffled. “I took pictures.”

“Video would have been more informative,” Sherlock replied instantly, taking the bejeweled phone. It didn't ask for a PIN, just a _slide_ _to_ _unlock,_ which Sherlock did, accessing the image gallery.

The pictures told the story of two girls going out to a club backwards. Sherlock slid through the pictures without pausing. The first picture was of a group of young men and the two girls posing in a ... selfie, and the last one was of the two girls (dressed and made up almost ritualistically similarly, normative pressure at work there) posing seemingly just before they left for the previous evening. None of it explained anything.

“Let me guess. Your friend left with one of these gentlemen,” Sherlock showed the last picture, “and is now not responding to your messages.”

“No!” The girl sat forward and snatched the phone from him. “That's the point! She did respond!” She turned the phone around for Sherlock to look at again, this time showing a message on the screen, which had been sent about six hours earlier, at around 6am.

Their talkin about sellin me !!1 I dont think its a joke! D: D:

Sherlock pressed his lips together, fighting the urge to grab a red pen and correct the grammar of the message. That at least was somewhat interesting, though most likely a drunk girl's panicked misunderstanding of what was going on around her as she woke in an unfamiliar place.

“So instead of ringing the police, you came to see me,” Sherlock said after having wrestled down his irate desire to leave the girl to his fate as punishment for her disability to write simple sentences. Sherlock did not believe in heaven or hell but he wished that people who couldn't make the difference between _their,_ _there_ and _they're_ would end up in some special suffering.

“I dunno where she is, I wouldn't know what to tell the cops.” The girl burst into fresh tears in the middle of her sentence, making it almost indecipherable. John leaned forwards to offer her the tissues again, giving Sherlock a look. It was a mystery how he could put so many words in one look ('human suffering is far more important than a man who is already dead, be _nice_ to the girl').

Sherlock hoped his expression communicated his opinion on the matter as clearly as John's did. He took the girl's mobile again and downloaded the pertinent information off it and onto his laptop. “Fine, I'll look into it. Now go away.” A lie, of course.

He wasn't doing it because the girl had cried (particularly not because of that), or because she'd asked, or even because John had made a threatening face, but because he'd calculated that (seemingly) accepting the case would make her go away faster and get John off his back (so to speak). He had no intention of having anything to do with the whole thing whatsoever.

While Sherlock was perfectly capable of shutting out noises and voices if he so desired, they did still register on some subconscious level, letting him know if the situation was normal. Currently he became aware of a silence in the flat and re-focused his eyes from his thoughts to the other arm chair in front of him and John sitting in it, looking displeased, sans the girl.

Sherlock sighed. “What?”

“Do I even need to say it?”

Ah, the indifference to the so-called human suffering. It was a conversation they'd had many times, and it was a habit Sherlock found difficult to lose. “Everyone needs a vice.”

“Some people could do with a virtue, too,” John muttered.

Sherlock fixed him with a look. “You love me.”

John was quiet for a bit, then stood up. “Yeah,” he agreed. “But I don't always like you.”

“I can live with that.” Sherlock jumped up and headed for his coat. Finally they could get to the bottom of the actually interesting mystery in front of them. “Grab your indignation and let's go visit the selfstore.”

From the opinionated silence coming from John's direction Sherlock could tell that he disagreed with this plan, but he couldn't expect Sherlock to ignore something like this, an actual mystery with severed hands and dead men with strange conditions and tattoos.

“The black substance under the nails of the severed hand was iron gall ink, slightly acidic,” John said suddenly. Or at least it felt sudden to Sherlock as they sat in a cab. So Molly had actually worked on that.

“15th century ink,” Sherlock supplied. “Different from carbon ink in the sense that it penetrates the parchment instead of merely adhering to the surface of it. The Voynich manuscript is from the 15th century. Hardly a coincidence.”

“But why would it be under the fingernails of the severed hand? Was the owner scratching it off something?”

Sherlock knew that when a scribe made a mistake when working on a parchment/vellum manuscript, they scraped the ink off with a blade's edge, removing a layer off the top of the parchment. Pages of vellum could even be reused in this way, but the removal of the ink left its marks. It was possible the hand's owner had tried to remove already written text off a page, but it was not as likely as him simply having made some of the ink or worked with it.

“Could it be... he was forging something, making it look as though it was made in the 15th century, to pass off as a fake?” John asked next.

Sherlock glanced at him. “Big leap to make from a hand alone,” he said, but approvingly. Though needless to say it was pointless to entertain theories before all the facts were present.

“Right, whatever,” John replied. “After we've looked into the storage locker, we're going to help that poor girl find her friend, yeah?”

Sherlock looked away from John's glare. He had no intention of helping that annoying box of whines and source of mangled English OR her friend. Or possibly whoever had or had not kidnapped her. If her friend was as shrill and mind-numbing, they'd surely either kill her (in which case rescuing her was a moot point) or just quietly let her go (in which case the above held as well). It'd all probably become another point of contention between him and John, which would hardly be a surprise.

However, Sherlock had far more interesting things on his plate, or in his (someone else's) storage locker. He bounced out of the cab and into the semi-fresh air of London, bright-eyed and bushy-haired. He could almost taste the excitement (it tasted like victory) on his tongue, and feel the carbonation of it in his limbs and the pit of his stomach. He loved this feeling, this expectation, this newness. At its best his relationship with John gave him the same feeling.

Changing the dynamic of their established relationship with that kiss three weeks ago might have been a mistake, though Sherlock was not one to fall prey to regret and doubt, but he could tell John was plagued by both (he'd said 'sorry' after kissing him earlier, for God's sake). It wasn't a desirable situation and he had considered ways to undo it all a few times. That or he needed to have conversation with John, which he had played out in his mind palace, running it over and over again, trying to see a way out of the endless loop that he foresaw in it. John would say he was not gay, and then Sherlock would try to explain that labels were misleading, misinformative and misused, and that being gay was not even required, and then John would say he was not gay. How do you have a conversation with someone who isn't even talking about the same thing?

At least one thing was a constant: the complete disinterest of minimum wage employees. Sherlock had the key to a locker so they weren't really interested in who he was as they entered the selfstore. And perhaps it was a bit useful his face had been all over newspapers and the internet lately, people who didn't recognise him would still have seen a picture of him (most likely) and think he looked familiar, which could lead them to infer that he must've visited them before. In this case the clerk at the selfstore seemed to consider him a regular visitor and waved him through.

“Stop skipping,” John muttered as they headed for the banks of lockers. “It's making you look suspiciously gleeful.”

“Why are outward signs of happiness always suspect?” Sherlock asked, walking in a more measured way.

“Usually because people think that happiness doesn't just happen, there has to be a reason. Your happiness only happens near corpses and crime scenes, so it's doubly suspect.”

“But I'm not happy that someone's died.”

“Aren't you? You just don't mean it personally because it doesn't matter to you who's died, as long as someone has so you have something to do,” John said with a roll of his eyes. He was surprisingly cavalier about it.

“So? You're happy if someone's wounded so you can save them,” Sherlock snorted.

“I'm happy I can save them, yeah,” John replied. “Not happy they're wounded.”

“What's the difference? You wouldn't be able to save them if they weren't wounded so it's all the same in the end.”

“There's a certain degree of difference that's pretty important to some people,” John sighed, but cleverly didn't try to explain it. He must've noticed how Sherlock was already zoning out of the conversation.

Semantics were all well and good, except when Sherlock didn't care about it. Which was right now. They had arrived at the locker which was in the section 2c, number (0)27. The excitement was palpable and visible to a degree which John had just termed 'suspiciously gleeful'. But so what? Mysteries were what made life worth living. Solving mysteries made it worth gloating about. John wasn't on the same page about that, particularly when it came to mystery pieces of human in the fridge. Or the oven. But to be fair, human parts in the oven were a whole different story, it implied cooking (even if the oven at 221B didn't work, which was because Sherlock had disconnected it) and cooking human was universally considered unacceptable (for whatever reason, it'd solve the world hunger problem).

The key slipped into the padlock, turned, and released the latch. Sherlock was so excited he was practically shaking as he took off the lock and shoved it and the key at John. He caught a glimpse of John's face as he did that and he, too, was grinning. Of course he would be. Despite all of his protests to the contrary, he loved the excitement as much as Sherlock did.

In the locker were two old books, identical at first glance.

Sherlock stopped to stare after having thrown the door open. Two books. A musty smell rose from the locker, similar to libraries housing multitudes of dust particles and decaying vellum. But underneath that was something acrid. Sherlock closed his eyes and took another deep lungful.

Was that... fresh glue?

“John,” he said sharply. “What do you smell?”

He heard John shift and take a breath, though even that was disappointed. He was disappointed about the books. How could he be when he didn't even know what was in them?

“It smells a bit odd. Old books were written on parchment, weren't they? Um, calfskin?”

“Yes, yes, but what else?” Sherlock made a gesture at John to keep going.

“Leather, I suppose,” John moved closer, close enough to crowd Sherlock a bit. All it did was to make John waft up Sherlock's nose, distracting him.

“Not the bookbinding glue?” Sherlock questioned, opening his eyes, leaning in to inspect the books closer. “They look the same, don't they? I think one of them- or perhaps both are new copies of something old.”

At least John knew not to say something dull and obvious like 'but they look so old' because Sherlock would have had to renounce their friendship right then and there.

“We're taking these, go pay the man,” Sherlock said, reaching into the locker to take one of the books.

'It isn't even our locker,' John's face said as Sherlock glanced at him when he hadn't moved immediately, but then he just sighed and trundled along to do as he was told like a good little soldier. It was imperative the books were immediately retrieved for further study at 221B, or even the pathology lab at Barts.

Sherlock swept out of the store with a book under each arm and hailed a cab with his foot. Well, technically someone else hailed the cab and Sherlock took it, ignoring all protests because whatever that person had been doing couldn't be more important than what Sherlock had in his hands.

About halfway to Baker Street he realised that John wasn't in the cab. He took out his phone and texted him.

 _Took cab. Meet at home_.

There was no reply from which he knew John was quite mad at him for leaving him behind. Or forgetting him. Or both. These two things weren't mutually exclusive as Sherlock had left John behind a number of times completely intentionally.

He cleared the desk by pushing all non-breakables off onto the floor and getting a clean sheet from John's closet to spread on it before put the books down. Then he got his surgical lamp and magnifier and some cotton gloves and started studying them.

The dulcet tones of a cranky John Watson heralded his arrival some time later. “You are a giant bag of dicks,” he declared. “And an idiot.”

The latter made Sherlock look up with a frown.

“Fine, I take back the idiot,” John huffed and proceeded over to slam a piece of paper on the desk in front of Sherlock. He also brought along a whiff of pub, which made Sherlock glance at his watch. Oh, more time had passed than he'd thought and John had gone to drown his anger at—not his favourite pub, wrong smell—but a pub on the way. There was a name and an address on the piece of paper.

“Bit early for a drink,” Sherlock mentioned, but then moved on immediately. John liked a bit of drink, but not in a quantity that was bothersome. “What do you know about bookbinding?”

John had sat in his chair and picked up the paper. “What do you know about human trafficking?” he countered.

“John, you are a free man, you can work that case on your own instead of trying to force it down my throat. In fact, why don't you ring the Metropolitan police to look into it?”

“Let me repeat myself, you're a bag of dicks,” John replied, rustling the paper. It was clear he wasn't reading it but using it as a deflective device. “I got you the name and address of the person who originally rented that locker while you were busy leaving.”

Sherlock glanced at the scrap of paper, then got up with one of the books. “John, look,” he said and snatched John's paper away, plopping the book in its place. “Or rather smell it. That's modern glue. Quite fresh, too. This one's an almost perfect forgery of that other book.”

“Brilliant,” John sighed. “But what does it mean?”

Sherlock ignored him, texting Molly instead. She rang him soon.

“I didn't really find out anything else,” she was saying. Sounded tired. “Most of the internal organs were quite normal, except for the alimentary tract, which you saw. I didn't find any... human bits in his stomach. Cause of death was asphyxiation, likely the, uh- the hand.”

“Ta,” Sherlock said and terminated the call, hopping into his chair. John was leafing through the book.

“Sherlock? Did you look at what's written in this book?” he asked, frowning. “It's not English.”

“Look it up on Wikipedia,” Sherlock snorted. “It's the same type of... code that's used in the Voynich manuscript.”

“I thought so.” John nodded at him and leafed through some more pages. “Though are you sure it's a code and not just made-up gibberish?”

“It's something worth forging near perfectly,” Sherlock replied.

“It's not worth as much as a young woman's life and freedom,” John said then, snapping the book shut and glaring at Sherlock a little, though the worst edge was gone.

“You're still not on about that, are you?” Sherlock rolled his eyes, looking up the address John had gotten on Google Maps. It was outside London proper, looked like a bigger property. He dropped his mobile into his lap and steepled his fingers under his chin. So. Someone had forged an old manuscript, someone who had access to the original (now on the desk behind Sherlock), perhaps the same someone whose cut-off hand had suffocated a strange, tattooed man who could eat anything and everything. Was it also the hand of the man who had rented the lockers? Mr Ljuga, first name initial V.

John drummed his fingers on the back of the forged book. “So? When are we going?” he asked then. Faithful to his adrenaline habit as always.

Sherlock unfolded from his chair and stepped over to John's, leaning down to kiss him quickly on the lips. “Now,” he said with a grin and headed to get his coat. He heard John sigh behind him, and a brief glance behind revealed a John with a slight flush on his face, looking after Sherlock with that mix of confusion and yearning he did so well.

“Coming?” Sherlock asked from the hall, looping his scarf around his neck.

“Yes... Yeah,” John said and soon appeared by Sherlock to get his coat on as well. A grown man with three continents' worth of experience in sexual relations still confused when he got kissed? Well, Sherlock did have that effect on people a lot of the time.

“You don't have to gloat, you know,” John muttered as he got his coat on, not looking at him.

“Who's gloating?” Sherlock said over his shoulder, heading for the stairs.

“You are. And it can be seen from space,” John pointed out, following.

“Oh well.” Sherlock shrugged and grinned and continued gloating as he speed-walked down the street to find them a cab.

It was late afternoon when the cab deposited Sherlock and John outside the residence at the address Mr Ljuga had supplied to the selfstore. Despite the relative brightness of said afternoon (it was cloudy, but not dark) the house—mansion, really—looked (not foreboding, that would've implied Sherlock was afraid of a building) old. Desiccated and untended vines grew over it and dominated the front garden. A wrought-iron gate blocked the driveway and the rest was surrounded by a brick fence. The windows were dark.

“Cheery,” John said, restlessly making fists with his hands as he looked at the building.

“No need to allocate human emotions to places or features of weather,” Sherlock had walked forward to grab the gate but it was locked the old-fashioned way _(id_ _est,_ not electronically). There was an actual lock on it. “Let's circle around.”

“It's called a pathetic fallacy,” John sighed, but Sherlock only picked up on the word 'pathetic' as he walked away.

“The wall is about 2.5 metres high,” Sherlock said, walking along it. “Not impossible to scale.” Though of course the brick exterior was quite smooth and didn't offer much in the way of hand or footholds. John was of enough height and strength to work as a stepladder if needed. Still, it was more likely there'd be a back gate.

However, when they found the back gate (also wrought iron and also locked, but easier to climb with no decorative spearheads on the top like the front gate), Sherlock turned to look at John. “Why are you still confused?” he asked. Their social contract had changed, yes, but they had both agreed to change it, albeit wordlessly. At least Sherlock had thought so.

“A little elaboration wouldn't hurt,” John said, glancing at Sherlock. He'd grabbed the gate by its rungs and shook it a little. The hinges were rusty and clearly it hadn't been used in a while, but the same could be said about the house as well. The back garden was even wilder than the one in the front, and quite a lot of ground had been taken over by unpruned hawthorn ( _crataegus_ _monogyna_ ) shrubs.

“You kissed me. I kissed you. You were... uncomfortable.”

John shook the gate again, making plaster crumple off the pillars where the hinges were attached. “I wasn't uncomfortable,” he replied after a bit. “I was nervous.”

“What would make you nervous? You're experienced with romantic and sexual situations.” Sherlock brought out a flick knife from his pocket, flipping it open and offering it to John by the blade.

John glanced at him and took the edged weapon. “Where'd you get- you know, never mind.” He used the blade to dig around the hinges to try and lever them out of the porous stone. “To answer your question... you make me nervous.”

“Because I'm male,” Sherlock nodded. He'd known this was coming. Renegotiaton of the terms of their social contract. Was there a trial period in these things?

“No. Well. Yes, that too.” John nodded, not looking at him, working on the hinges with a frown on his face. “But you're my best friend. My best... everything.”

Sherlock was quiet for a moment, hands in his pockets, watching John. There was a damp wind that made the overgrown garden creak and brought the smell of dirt and decaying plant matter. He knew what John was saying. Forging (or forcing) a romantic relationship could break what they already had and losing what they already had was not an option.

“You want the status quo back,” he muttered. It was surprisingly difficult to consider it, but he understood. If the choices were having John as a friend and not having him at all, he'd pick the former and John seemed to feel the same (as far as Sherlock could tell with his massive amount of data on John).

John paused in his chipping process and looked at Sherlock. He didn't look pleased, however, just conflicted.

“I thought you'd adapt to the change,” Sherlock admitted. “You're good at adapting.”

“No.” John shook his head. “I just realised we're breaking and entering.”

“Well, only technically. We're actually only trespassing so far,” Sherlock said with a little smirk, shrugging a little.

“That doesn't make it... legal.” (Very clever of him to choose that word.) But John kept chipping and pulling at the gate, soon popping the upper hinge out of the crumbling stone. “Right, I think we can fit in- right- here.” He huffed, having exerted his upper body strength, which always surprised Sherlock, despite knowing it was there. “Also, I'm keeping this,” he said, folding the knife away.

“Whatever,” Sherlock said and went to squeeze into the garden. John kept confiscating everything sharp-edged he handled. As if Sherlock didn't know how to wield an edged weapon and as if he would even consider murdering someone in such a crude manner (except in self-defence). Then there was a text from Molly.

“John,” he said. “The corpse has been removed from Barts, along with everything found in it or on it, and Molly's autopsy report deleted and destroyed.”

“What? Why?” John gasped as he managed to pop through the narrow opening. “That's not good.”

“Depends on the definition of good and on who is doing the defining,” Sherlock muttered, putting his phone away. “It doesn't matter. We have the key and the books and this.”

“Don't you think they'll ask her if you were involved? Whoever they are.”

“Why would they? And she won't tell,” Sherlock replied, glancing at John who was now stuck on some hawthorn. He was worrying again.

“Did they hurt her? What did she say?” John pulled free of the shrubbery.

“If she can text I doubt she's badly hurt or traumatised, John,” Sherlock huffed. “For God's sake, stop playing in the bushes and just come on.”

The garden was very densely overgrown, its central feature of a fountain also covered in vine and cracked from the foundation up by the roots of the trees (European beech, _fagus_ _sylvatica_ ) surrounding it. It was also a common deciduous element used in hedging, just like hawthorn, but these were clearly trees planted for ornamental reasons. Leaves still clung to them, though most of them were carpeting the gravel pathways and overgrown grass and the previously white fountain. There were four big beech trees and it was easy enough to check with a mobile application where the cardinal directions were and if the trees corresponded to them. They did. Hm.

“What?” John asked from the other side of the fountain, looking up at Sherlock.

“Did I say something?” Sherlock looked back at him, putting his mobile away.

“You made that sound.” John shrugged. “So what'd you find out or realise?”

“Trees are planted according to the cardinal directions.”

“That doesn't seem so unusual.” John circled back around the fountain to stand next to Sherlock. “It seems like a landscaping decision. A round fountain surrounded by a square of trees.”

“Yes, thank you for the enlightening me with your knowledge of basic geometric shapes,” Sherlock said, moving towards the house again. He was quite sure that everything actually interesting (such as books and forging equipment) would be inside the house, not in the back garden.

“Time to break and enter,” he said cheerfully as they made their way over to the house. The garden was almost a maze, but some gravel paths still existed, one leading to a more open area in front of the back door. Locked of course. Sherlock knocked. “Oh, did you hear that, I clearly heard someone say come in,” he grinned at John. Plausible deniability and all that.

John just rolled his eyes, moving away to peer into a window, but then pulled away with a slight puzzlement evident on his face. “The windows are blocked with something. Drapes or cloth of some sort, I think.”

“All of them?” Sherlock was looking into his pockets for lockpicks. This house, just like the iron gates, had a very old-fashioned lock. Easier to pick.

“Think so,” John replied, having moved to the other side. “We should tell Greg.”

“Tell who? Tell what?” Sherlock had crouched in front of the door. “A man had his hand severed. He could still be alive. Don't you think it's our duty to go in and try to find him?”

“Assuming it had anything to do with the key, assuming it was Ljuga's hand, assuming he lives here at all,” John snorted. “I know what you're trying to do, stop it.”

“I have no idea what you're talking about,” Sherlock said completely without shame at his attempt at manipulation. It hadn't been a very good attempt, anyway. More of a token. “The hand we found was removed while the person was still alive.”

“Yeah, it just doesn't mean that the person is still alive.” John stood by him anyway, looking around, making sure they were alone and undisturbed. Not that the area was teeming with people or anything. It was still a sign of loyalty. Sherlock stopped fiddling with the tumblers for a moment and looked up at John. His jaw was moving as he repeatedly grit his teeth and then relaxed again. He had learned it was usually a marker of frustration (or anger) when it came to John. John was gazing across the garden, not acknowledging him, though he must have known Sherlock was looking (he had been a soldier, he must have learned how to use his peripheral vision).

“John,” Sherlock said. “I don't want to return to a merely platonic relationship. You are... important.” He hoped John understood. Statistically speaking he should understand, he had a good track record of understanding and translating Sherlock. Personal wasn't important, but Sherlock had broken this rule by making John (something very personal) important.

John looked at him now, eyes round in surprise and jaw relaxed. “That- that's nice,” he said quietly.

“ _Nice_?” Sherlock scowled, turning back to the lock. “From Latin _nescius_ which means ignorant and incapable. Or foolish.”

“Not what I meant,” John was quick to protest. “I was just surprised. Can we not talk about this now?”

“You mean while breaking and entering, though I'd like to point out I'm not breaking anything, merely entering,” Sherlock said as the lock clicked open and he stood up. John was about to say something but Sherlock overrode him. “When is a better time? We're alone now. That's when people have these conversations, isn't it? When they're alone.”

“Yes, but- God, what's that smell?” John wrinkled his nose as Sherlock opened the door, and indeed an odour of unpleasant rot (not like the decaying plant matter in the garden, but the stench of dust, stillness, and decomposing animal matter) was seeping out of the darkness inside the house. The door didn't open very far because something was blocking it from the inside.

Sherlock took out his phone and turned on the torch app, looking in past the door. “I think I can squeeze in. There's some sort of a box in the way.”

“Great, why don't I go first?” John had splayed his hand on the small of Sherlock's back, trying to peer in past him.

“Touching, but no.” Sherlock glanced at him. “And to answer your question, I believe the smell originates from the incredible clutter inside the house.”

“Or we could call Lestrade.”

“Whatever for?” Sherlock asked as he started winding his way around the door and over the box.

“Oh, just, I don't know, so someone would know where we died,” John muttered, still reaching after Sherlock to touch him, holding onto the decorative belt at the back of his coat.

Sherlock just snorted, having managed to get past the door and onto almost level floor beyond the cardboard box. On either side of him rose walls of... stuff. Just rubbish. Piles of newspapers, more boxes, dust rising off everything in his wake. It was barely wide enough for a person to walk and ahead he could see it got even narrower. He felt and heard John follow him in, gasping because he'd held his breath to get through the door.

“Are you going to hold onto my coat all the way?” Sherlock asked when he felt John yank on it a bit as he recollected his balance.

“Yes,” John replied stolidly and then that was that. Sherlock knew from the tone of his voice (and if he'd seen his face, John wouldn't even have had to say anything) that he meant it and it was useless to argue. Sherlock had learned to live with it. Compromise and all that. He also knew John wasn't holding on because he was frightened of the dark or uncertain on his feet, he was holding on to literally hold Sherlock back from charging off into the unknown. He cared (his ability to do so was not diminished by intelligence and rationality) and Sherlock accepted this as another compromise.

“What do you perceive?” he asked, not moving yet, just looking around, even though what he could see was very limited. The air was thick with particles their entry had stirred up.

“Very little,” John replied, voice muffled by their surroundings. The piles absorbed sound effectively. “The smell, obviously. Dead animals, do you think? Trapped birds and rodents. All of this... stuff. The lower layers are probably pretty old. Even the floor's uneven. Are we standing in dirt?”

“If by dirt you mean decomposed and decomposing... garbage.” He couldn't be sure without closer examination of its composition. He had a piece of John's notepad in his pocket, the page with all the phone numbers. He bent down to quickly scoop up a sample of the compost (gloves on) and folded it into the paper, slipping it back into his pocket. “Do you see any dates on the papers in the piles?”

“Umm... no.” There was some fumbling and then there was more light as John used his phone to look around. “Here's one. 19...78?”

“Don't use up your battery, we might need it later,” Sherlock instructed and started moving forward. It seemed whoever (possibly V. Ljuga) lived here was a compulsive hoarder. Impressive, really. The place was big (as annoyingly inaccurate as an adjective like 'big' could be).

“We might?” The light went out. “Not sure I want to spend that much time here. Without a hazmat suit.” The last was added in a mutter, but it was quiet enough inside the house for Sherlock to hear it clearly.

The massive walls of detritus shifted and moaned as Sherlock inched forward with John attached to his back. The floor somewhere beneath the refuse must have been buckling with the weight. It creaked and unseen things skittered and scratched beyond the meagre light of Sherlock's mobile. It was unsafe, there was no doubt about that. But it was also stimulating. Sherlock felt himself grinning, which was odd because he wasn't intentionally moving the muscles in his face to achieve it.

The ceiling was high enough to not be visible in the not very well focused light of the flash function being used as a torch. Sherlock hadn't spotted an actual wall yet, just the ones made from all this refuse, but thanks to the position of the back door he figured they were in a room, probably near a kitchen, but so far there hadn't been any furniture or fixtures. It was possible no one had lived here for a long time, or had only lived in a small part of the house. It was interesting that these passages had been maintained, however. Or not maintained (that suggested an active interest in keeping the aisles clear) but not filled either.

“There's a soft spot on the floor here,” Sherlock said as he inched forward, feeling the floor bend under his step. He could see an intersection some metres in front of them.

John began to say something, Sherlock could hear how he inhaled in the strange soundscape of the brimming house, between the creaks and shifts, and then there was a crack, but not a sharp crack, a damp one. Rotten wood giving up under (years and years) of weight, newly agitated by the added pressure of two people walking over it. Sherlock's personal time dilated. He heard John's gasp and how the walls began to collapse. The rubble cascaded over him, forcing him forward and onto his stomach on the floor while behind him John obviously struggled, starting to say something, but then forced into a breathless yelp instead and then (seemingly ages later) several things hitting water, one of them undoubtedly John Watson.

Sherlock crawled forward, feeling the floor buckle further. His phone was still grasped in his hand, but the dust of the decomposing debris that had been disturbed by the sudden cave-in had made the air thick to the point of being opaque. Sherlock pulled his scarf up to cover his nose and mouth before breathing in more, already feeling the tingle of coughing in his throat.

“John,” he said hoarsely, having freed himself of the collapse. He turned his head, watching over his shoulder as the junk slowly moved and fell through the floor, causing the sound of faint splashes below. “John,” he said again, louder. “John!”

There was more sloshing and then sounds of spitting and coughing somewhere beneath the still-moving garbage. “Sherlock?” John's voice was faint but audible. It echoed a bit as though he'd fallen into an underground (underhouse) lake.

A horrible feeling washed over Sherlock like a wave, making his heart pound painfully as though it had just restarted. He gasped a little, incredibly relieved, to the point of feeling boneless. “I'm here,” he replied. “Are you all right?”

“Wet, freezing,” more coughing, “and blind.”

There was a pause. Sherlock didn't move much yet, not wanting to cause another avalanche. “Literally, or..?” he finally asked.

“It's pitch black, Sherlock,” John replied, voice tinny and a little louder (with the particular timbre and tone of his patience being tested). “The water's up to my chest.”

“Cold?” Sherlock crawled forward, pushing things aside to get to the break in the floor without also going through it.

“Yeah,” John said. “Don't ask me to estimate how cold.”

Sherlock had just been about to ask that, but stayed quiet. “All right, I'll assume the worst. Using the ambient temperature as a guide you'll have about an hour before hypothermia. Up to which rib is the water?”

“The second.” John was obviously attempting to keep his voice level.

Sherlock didn't reply, setting the timer on his phone to count down from an hour, then tried to send a text to Lestrade, but it refused to go through. Then he tried ringing him, but there was no signal.

“No signal,” he said. “That doesn't make any sense.”

“Sherlock,” John said. “Find the signal. Find a way out.”

“Rational. I can accept that,” Sherlock replied. He'd managed to shift a box enough to shine the light down the hole. John's face was pale against the shifting mass of dark water, perhaps one and a half metres below the level of the floor. “Is there a current?” he asked.

“No, and it smells bad,” John squinted in the light, pushing away some of the things that had fallen down and were now bobbing alongside him in the water.

“Bad,” Sherlock huffed, crawling backwards to get on a sound piece of floor so he could get up. “How insightful. You'll probably get giardiasis, you know. Stagnant water, probably untreated, combination of groundwater and perhaps a pipe leak or break.”

“Or cyclosporiasis,” John replied, voice a bit tighter again as the light disappeared (or that was the reason Sherlock assumed made John uncomfortable). “If sewage has leaked in.”

“Were you submerged when you fell in?” Sherlock got up, looking around, moving forward to the intersection.

“Yeah, of course,” John replied. “Got it in my mouth, eyes, nose... Probably going to get swimmer's ear.” His voice was quite a lot fainter as Sherlock turned around the corner to the left, only to see another similar passageway leading into darkness.

“Campylobacteriasis or possibly tapeworm infection,” Sherlock called out, heading on.

“Ascariasis if dog feces has gotten into the water,” he heard John say, though very faintly. The hoard walls were very good sound barriers. After that Sherlock heard nothing from John, just the shifting, sliding, skittering, scratching, scraping of the barriers enclosing him.

There was another turn, only to the right this time and he looked down another corridor, with things in such unstable mountains on either side of the scant free space that they created an archway.

“John,” he called out but his voice was swallowed and diminished by his surroundings, and suddenly he could hear his heart beating, his breath coming and going through the nearly useless protection of his scarf over his lower face. For a moment he recalled the anechoic chamber, which brought on a strange shudder (his body was secreting adrenaline, his muscles were tensing and he could feel the pilomotor reflex at work). He turned, and though he had only gone left and right once, the appearance of the accumulation of waste around him was unnervingly undifferentiated. If he had gone a longer way without memorising the turns, it would have been easy to get lost (for a person without the massive memory capabilities that he had, obviously).

“E. coli, salmonella, toxoplasmosis,” he said once closer to the collapse, lowering himself on his stomach to spread his weight so as not to cause another cascade.

“Right,” he heard John say and he also heard the utter relief in his voice though only a handful of minutes had passed. The lack of light did strange things to people, even ones with John's experience with horrors of human life.

Sherlock shone the light through the hole. “I'm coming down there,” he said. It wasn't a rational choice. The odds were he would have been better off without getting them both wet in a hole under the ground where there was no guarantee of an exit. It wasn't rational, no, but he could still rationalise it. John was down there. John had no light. John was at risk of hypothermia. It was an impairment of reason that led to cognitive dissonance, but he felt his (their) chances of survival were better together.

“No, Sherlock-” John began to say, but Sherlock cut him off.

“For God's sake, John, take my phone and move out of the way before the floor gives out again.” He was reaching down with their only source of light (John's mobile was now useless as it was underwater). He'd determined passing it down was the best way to keep it from getting wet should his descent fail to be entirely graceful. The combined length of their arms was just enough for John to be able to grasp the bottom of the phone when Sherlock hung his arm straight down off the edge off the hole.

“I don't think putting both of us at risk of never getting out of the water is a good idea,” John said more quietly, but he moved aside when he had the phone securely in hand.

Sherlock had calculated that a fast approach would be best to keep the integrity of the floor and the collapsing piles as near to their current state as possible. He reversed his position and slid down feet first, cringing as he hit the water and was swallowed by it up to his ribs. Even the water seemed thick with filth and the air as well, the dust stirred up again by his descent. He managed to keep his balance and not slip completely underwater, but the dampness sneaked up his suit and coat anyway.

“What a fun time we shall have,” he remarked once he'd regained his balance. “Vomiting and suffering from fever together from all these protozoa.”

“Yeah, and those are the pleasant symptoms,” John agreed, moving close again and grasping Sherlock's coat again, much to Sherlock's surprise, but then he took another look at John's face in the unflattering light of his mobile. The relief was so utter and absolute.

“The dark bothered you,” Sherlock remarked as he looked around as he waited for the water to go still, though they'd soon disturb it again. He couldn't see any walls, but there were pillars and struts, meaning this must have been some sort of a basement or cellar, at least once upon a time.

“Not the dark,” John said, voice low. “I couldn't see the dark, but the things I could hear in it...”

“The water ripples,” Sherlock said. “Could you hear the water hitting something solid somewhere, like a wall?”

“Not exactly,” John's reply was wan. “If we'd taken that case about the locked room murder, or the one about human trafficking... we could be a in a bar having a drink right now.”

“Yeah and be bored,” Sherlock snorted. He glanced up the hole they'd both come through. He knew which way he'd faced so he knew which direction the door was and from that and the tree arrangements they'd seen outside he could extrapolate north. Not that cardinal directions meant as much inside a water-logged cellar as they would have in a forest. Not that he'd ever really been lost in a forest. Not that he even cared about wilderness survival skills.

“This way,” he said. Walking in chest deep water freezing water with a wool greatcoat on wasn't all that comfortable, but he was not going to abandon his coat. Besides, John was holding onto the hem of it.

There wasn't a wall where he calculated one should be if it was in line with the outer wall of the house above. A little puzzling, but not unheard of. It was best to stick to one direction, so he forged on, though every now and then he stopped to listen. There was no sound of air moving, the water obviously lapped at them, making small noise. Things shifted above them in the ceiling/floor, under the weight of the hoard it was holding up. It smelled like rot and stagnant water and filth, and the torch app on the phone illuminated almost absolutely nothing. There was nothing for it to illuminate except black water and columns and at first Sherlock's eyes didn't even register the wall in front of them because it was just another dark expanse.

The wall was slimy, but it was something for them to follow. Sherlock checked the timer on his mobile. John had been in the water for twenty-one minutes and forty seconds. Forty-one. John's hands were shaking and Sherlock knew it was from the cold because the situation was (should have been) exciting enough. No, not exciting. Tense. Yes.

“I agree,” John said, voice a bit shaky too. He must have been biting his teeth together to stop them from clicking together. “Tense is a better word for this than exciting. Because I'm far from excited. I'm the opposite of excited. I'm-”

“Unenthusiastic?” Sherlock said as he waded on. He must've spoken out loud again while thinking. That or John now had the ability to read his thoughts. Ha. Not likely.

“I was going to say pissed off,” John replied.

“That's not exactly the opposite of ex-”

“I KNOW,” John spoke unnecessarily loudly, his voice echoing off the water and the columns. “Stop with the damn semantics, Sherlock.”

“Twenty-seven minutes and three seconds,” Sherlock said flatly. He understood John's outburst, he could be suffering from hypothermia soon and that would obviously lower his chances of survival to almost zero if they were not able to find a way out.

“Thank you for the running tally of my chances,” John grumbled, but he didn't let go of Sherlock's coat. He still trusted Sherlock would get them out and that was exactly what Sherlock was going to do. He had memorised the amount of steps they had taken, both along the wall and across the free space from the hole to the wall. They could always backtrack and he could help John climb out. They'd have to turn back in about seven minutes to be able to do that.

“You're familiar with the first law of thermodynamics, I assume,” Sherlock said. It was a distraction technique, of course.

“Yeah, why is-”

“If the soldier who died of cerebral oedema had only described seeing his grandfather, you would've dismissed it as a hallucination caused by his condition, yes? However, you also saw the man he recognised as his grandfather. Energy cannot be created or destroyed, thus it could have been the energy that formerly operated his grandfather's body that visited him.”

John was quiet. Perhaps the cold was already affecting his brain. But then he spoke: “The energy in a human being dissipates upon death, it doesn't stay in a human shape and keep human motivations and interests.”

“How do you know?” Sherlock asked. They'd come to a corner. They had two minutes until they had to turn back, according to his timer.

“I don't, but neither do you,” John muttered and he was right.

Nevertheless, arguing about the possibility of human consciousness remaining intact after death was quite far from Sherlock's mind right then. There was a black void in the wall a small distance forward. That could only mean one thing and Sherlock rushed forward to prove his hypothesis.

Stairs. One minute overtime. Thirty-six minutes elapsed. Twenty-four minutes until the onset of hypothermia (no longer because of the water but because of wet clothes, John wore blends, synthetic, that was good).

“John,” Sherlock said, climbing on the stairs until he was out of the water, which made John do the same. “Hold the light,” he pushed his phone into John's hands. There was a door at the top, locked, warped wood. Sherlock knelt in front of the lock, not even admonishing John for making the light shake. It was clear this door hadn't been opened in a long time (but then again, the whole place seemed to have been abandoned for a long time, emphasis on _seemed_ ) _._ Lockpicks didn't go bad in water, at least.

The lock was old and rusted, but also simpler because of its age. It was easy to open (in theory, in practice the rust made it quite resistant). The door, however, stuck to its frame because of the damp. Sherlock may have been a little too forceful as he kicked it open. Dust and mould spores attacked him as the door flew halfway open and then got stuck. He coughed and gestured for John to follow. Neither of them was allergic to mould, which was good, but breathing in the spores was never healthy. Then again, with all the other particulates they'd already inhaled and ingested in this house, they would be lucky if all they got was a minor infection of some sort.

This new room wasn't as full as where they'd entered the house. It was on the same floor, the north-east side. It was dark with no sign of natural light, just full shelves and a few desks with equipment hidden under protective hoods. At least one microscope. Jars and brushes and piles of books. Sherlock forgot about being cold and wet and not knowing how to get out as he surged forward, looking around in the faint light of his mobile. There was glycerine-based hand-sanitiser by the covered microscope. He grabbed it. Someone had used this as a laboratory and a workroom. Sherlock's guess? The book forger, Mr Ljuga.

“John, the temperature, what is the room temperature here?” Sherlock was hoping he could find potassium permanganate to combine with the glycerine in the hand-sanitiser to create fire. KMnO4 was not a rare compound and was used it water treatment, he thought it was completely plausible he could find some here.

“S-sixteen degrees Celsius,” John replied slowly, shaking, having checked Sherlock's phone for it.

“Damn!” Sherlock slammed his hand on the table and looked around again. Glycerine and potassium permanganate only created fire in temperatures above 21 Celsius. John needed warmth. Now. Sherlock took off his coat and dropped it over John's shoulders. Some of it was still dry. “Look for a Bunsen burner, or matches. Anything. This is like a chemistry lab. There's bound to be something.”

Sherlock grabbed his phone and darted around the room. It was quite big, boxes everywhere on the floor, but there were paths, less dust, just damp. This place had been used more recently than other parts. He could smell the book glue in the air and there were books in various stages of binding on one of the tables. Then there was a glass cabinet, locked, with sealed boxes inside. One was marked _t-BuLi_.

“Yes!” Sherlock cried out. “John, grab anything that burns and pile it up. Now!” His hands shook as he grabbed the nearest heavy object (a paper weight shaped like a fish) and smashed the door of the glass cabinet to retrieve the small box. It was tightly sealed to protect its contents from the ambient moisture which was considerable. It was also quietly humming, clearly refrigerated by battery power. Sherlock tore the box open, bringing out a tiny Sure-Seal bottle. He tossed the box away and put the bottle carefully on the edge of the table and rushed to help John.

“What is it?” John asked, pale in the face.

“Organolithium. Tert-butyllithium, to be exact,” Sherlock replied. “It reacts with moisture to create fire.”

“No,” John said immediately. “We're not using that. I'm fine, I'll warm up as we find a way out of here.”

“We need fire and you don't let me carry a lighter any more,” Sherlock countered, grabbing a metal container, piling the papers and other flammables in it.

“We don't need to burn down the whole place-”

At that point Sherlock grabbed John and hugged him close, rubbing his back and arms vigorously. “You're going into shock,” he said.

“What? No-”

“Whatever bacterial or parasitic or protozoal infection we contract from being in this house can be treated with medicine. Hypothermia is treated with warmth. I am providing warmth. You don't even know what tert-butyllithium is.”

“N-no,” John admitted, having pressed close to Sherlock, now shaking from the strength of Sherlock's vigorous rubbing. “But you do and that worries me.”

“So we'll just make sure none of it gets on us or on our clothes and we don't breathe it in...” Sherlock muttered. “The fire will be contained in this metal box, it won't spread. We might need soda ash to put it out...”

John groaned. “Please shut up.”

“Or sand,” Sherlock said, pulling back a little to look at John. He'd put his phone down on the table and it's light was disappearing into the dark, not providing much actual illumination. Still, even in that meagre light, Sherlock could see John being paler than usual and the way he clenched his jaw to keep from trembling. “Step back,” he said, pushing John away as he grabbed the little vial and held it between his hands to warm it up faster, even if his body didn't have much warmth to share.

“Knife,” he said after a while and held out his hand. When nothing happened he turned to look at John who was leaning heavily against the edge of the table, shivering. “John!” Sherlock snapped and grabbed John's arm. “Give me the knife,” he said, enunciating every syllable very sharply.

John looked up with glassy eyes, blinked at him, then dug out the knife, his movements very stiff. It only made Sherlock very certain that he was making the right choice despite the dangers of organolithium compounds. He took the knife and used it to pry open the bottle, aiming it at the flammable (empty) pages in the box. As soon as air hit the tert-butyllithium it burst into fire. He'd handled it once before at uni, under some very strict supervision and a fume hood, wearing flame-retardant clothing. He tossed the whole of the vial into the box and stepped back. Fire sprouted out of it in the air, creating an arc of flame that followed the vial and then burst into a fire in the box. Sherlock took John by the shoulders and situated him near the fire to dry out.

“Stay,” he said. The fire created enough light for him to turn off his mobile and save what little battery was left. John had been completely submerged in the water so he was wet from head to toe and needed the warmth. In the meanwhile Sherlock needed to find them an egress. This was the first floor, if he could find a window he could break it and they could exit that way. Considering this room had obviously seen more use than what they'd seen of the house previously, there must have been a path that led out.

“John,” he called out after a while. This room was labyrinthine at best and utterly unnavigable at worst. The light from the fire was a mere suggestion of shadows in the pitch black and Sherlock had already banged his shins on too many things. At least the piles here were lower so he could climb over them (as an experienced furniture-mountaineer). “Why didn't you believe that the wall-paper from my previous case could cause insanity and death?”

John groaned, deep and long. He was only a shadow by the flickering fire, occasionally moving to tip more fuel into it. “O-of all the things you'd want to discuss...” he sighed. “Wall-paper can only drive a person mad figuratively.”

“How do you know?” Sherlock replied. He was only talking to keep John aware and awake (plus he enjoyed arguments). He stepped down off a pile of something and into something even more unpleasant. It was spongy with hard bits under his shoe and it squelched (or was it his shoe that did that).

“Because… Privation and confinement are more likely causes for what we saw. I'm surprised that you-”

“I've stepped on a dead person, John,” Sherlock informed him calmly. He turned on the light on his mobile to check. “Yep. Dead. Handless. I do believe I've located Mr Ljuga.” (Assuming it was Mr Ljuga who had lost his hand, assuming Mr Ljuga had given his real name at the selfstore, assuming Mr Ljuga owned this deathtrap of a house.)

“D-don't sound so happy about it,” John grumbled, though he should have known it was in vain. Sherlock would forever be delighted by dead people. However, this time the presence of a corpse wasn't why he was... relieved.

“Seems fresh enough. That means there's an exit that's been used recently, John, and we're going to get out of here,” he explained. Why did he still have to explain things to John. He looked around in the wan light of his mobile, considering the position of the corpse and the possible routes to it. People tended to take the easiest way around and that didn't usually involve climbing over mountains of rubbish that could collapse under them at any time.

(Nevertheless, he still took a moment to look over the dead man and get a few pictures of him. Late 50s, early 60s. An academic. Or a highly educated professional most likely working in a sedentary academic setting. Death hadn't been a violent one if one didn't count the missing hand. His pockets were empty. He seemed to be reclining in the cardboard boxes, which was an irrelevant observation, but one that struck Sherlock anyway.)

He made quick work of scouting the routes. One led to the middle of the room, a cleared-out workspace. He'd been working on another book, the skeleton of which Sherlock picked up (loose quires), along with a small bottle filled with a liquid (ink), as well as any floating pieces of interest he could fit in his jacket and trouser pockets. In the opposite direction he found a door.

The room itself wasn't particularly big, but its dimensions were distorted by the dark and the lack of clear space. At least the fire gave Sherlock a fixed point of reference and he was able to make his way back there, having left his phone by the door to mark it. He could tell he was shaking now, but he could still suppress it. He stuffed the vellum pages into the pocket of his coat that still hung on John when he got there.

“Found a door,” he said shortly. “Have you warmed up?”

“I'll live,” John replied, from which Sherlock inferred that the fire had helped but John had trouble according him the gratitude he deserved for creating it. Sherlock could understand it because of simple causal relations: he was the cause why they were there in the first place.

“Let's go,” Sherlock said. He grabbed a metal lid and put it over the fire, leaving them in the dark, with only the phone's light feebly shining behind boxes and shelves. They began the long walk towards it.

The house was a mystery and Sherlock loved it. He would be back as soon as possible, with tools and proper gear, he'd crack this place open and extract the heart of the matter (and then gloat over it, that went almost without saying). For now he needed to get John out of there and make sure there were no lasting ill effects.

He pointed the corpse out to John as they passed it, but John was strangely unaffected by it, even dismissive. At the door Sherlock picked up his mobile and opened it for John. Behind it was a short and quite clear passage to another door, which lead out. The scent of fresh air and the chill and brightness of the day (even if it was still heavily overcast and damp) were rather welcoming. John took deep breaths as he moved away from the house and slumped on the wet lawn. It wasn't the front door, nor the back door they'd entered through, but a side passage into a separate little garden. It had once been a kitchen garden, from the looks of it. Sherlock had already written half a text to Lestrade when he spotted a team of masked men geared with army grade equipment pointing their L85A2s at them, with a group of other men in hazmat suits behind them, unloading a van.

“John,” he said quietly, making John look up and clamber back onto his feet. The men advanced, most of them just flowing past them with SIS precision. Two of them stopped to guard Sherlock and John until a third one (they were all interchangeable in their gear) approached.

“Take them,” the obviously commanding officer said.

“Move it,” one of the men said, gesturing with the barrel of his rifle for them to start walking. The other one snatched Sherlock's mobile out of his hand. He thought about resisting, he thought about crushing the man's larynx (it didn't take that much strength), but then he thought about John. Alone would've been so easy, alone he could've done anything he wanted because he had no one else to support. They wouldn't have shot him, they might have roughed him up a little, but he was used to that. But annoyingly he didn't want to put John at further risk. So he let the man do a quick search on him (his pockets were emptied) and then grab him by the arm and take him to a black van. John received the same treatment, with Sherlock's coat having been taken off him.

They shared the windowless back of the van. Benches had been set on either side and John slumped onto one, with Sherlock sitting next to him more slowly, glaring at the men who closed the van doors. He then put his arm around John and pulled him to his side to share what was left of his body heat.

“How resentful are you, on a scale of one to ten?” Sherlock asked.

“It'd be like resenting a hurricane,” John muttered, eyes shut. “This is the end of this case, promise?”

The van started and jerked into a gear, soon rumbling down the gravel path. It was easy to keep track of where the vehicle travelled, it only required basic knowledge of arithmetic and a general idea of local geography, both of which Sherlock possessed. He counted while considering how to phrase his reply and looked at John for a clue on how to do it. John was frowning slightly, with the corners of his mouth drooping down. Furrows were etched into his brow and around his eyes and mouth. His face was effectively saying 'I'm done' and Sherlock had to respect that.

“Fine,” he sighed as the van turned onto a motorway. “I promise.” After all, if he chose to pursue this further, John didn't have to know about it.

“Where do you think they're taking us?” John asked after a while and Sherlock could forgive him this question because clearly his faculties were compromised by the situation he was in.

“Interrogation, risk assessment, where else?” Sherlock replied. “However, a more appropriate question would be 'why,' John.”

“I don't really care,” John replied. He was pressing against Sherlock's side very tightly, holding his arms around himself. “Recent research on the left temporo-parietal junction has shown that its response to electricity could be an explanation for seeing and feeling unknown presences in the same room.”

“Oh,” Sherlock was both gratified and surprised that John was willing to continue their discussion on the supernatural under the circumstances (and was able to use words like 'temporo-parietal'). “It doesn't explain why you and that soldier both saw what he claimed was his grandfather.”

“No, it doesn't,” John admitted, opening his eyes and looking up at Sherlock for a bit. “I don't need an explanation for everything. Isn't the defining feature of supernatural that it can't be explained by a naturalistic method?”

“No, just that we don't yet know what the explanation is,” Sherlock replied. “Pretend you're worse off than you are,” he added then. “That'll force them to focus their interrogation on me.” While it might have sounded altruistic, to make sure that Sherlock took the heat instead of John, it was far from it. John's ability to lie convincingly was unacceptable and Sherlock needed to know he wouldn't be undermined by someone's amateur attempts at spinning the truth.

John said nothing in reply to Sherlock's instructions, nor for the rest of the travel time. When the van stopped and the doors were opened again so Sherlock and John could be extracted, they were back in London. In a closed off courtyard, with an unremarkable door and a gate that led to the street. They were taken in through the door and installed in separate rooms (clearly for interrogation, with heavy sound-dampening). There was a table and two chairs on either side of it.

It wasn't long until the door opened again and Mycroft stepped in. One of the perhaps most annoying features about him was that he was quite difficult to read, even for Sherlock. He looked indifferent even now, perhaps mildly annoyed.

“I heard you were caught in a house of... interest,” Mycroft said and sat down on the other side of the table.

“Incorrect. I was caught coming out of a house of... interest,” Sherlock mimicked Mycroft's tone of voice and choice of words out of spite.

“Ah, yes. Coming out. Your favourite new pastime,” Mycroft needled back, at which Sherlock snorted. Unimaginative.

“It can hardly be called coming out when you find out about it by spying instead of from the person,” Sherlock pointed out, looking around the interrogation room in annoyed boredom.

“Mummy deserves to know,” Mycroft said in carefully off-handed manner which meant it was anything but off-handed.

“ _Semper_ _occultus,”_ Sherlock looked at him, knowing saying that would annoy Mycroft. It was the motto of the Secret Intelligence Service. Always secret.

“I have nothing to do with the SIS,” Mycroft sighed. “I don't understand why you keep perpetuating that myth to yourself and the rest of the world.”

“It literally perpetuates itself,” Sherlock snapped. “Is this all? I want to go home and have a shower. I spent thirty-seven minutes in what was essentially a sewer.”

“Only if you promise to turn over everything you have regarding the house, the dead man in it, the dead man's hand, and the man killed by said hand.”

“I have absolutely no idea what you're talking about,” Sherlock replied, getting up and fastening the button of his rather ruined jacket.

“Will the answer be the same if I ask our esteemed doctor the same?” Mycroft also stood up.

“Absolutely,” Sherlock headed for the door. He hoped John had internalised the rule of 'deny everything, particularly if Mycroft is asking'.

“Are you certain he is not a liability to you in this matter?” Mycroft smoothed out his suit. Sherlock just gave him a glare. Mycroft had been the one who had taught him the (ineffective) tactic of being alone and uncaring. He had now chosen otherwise with John and he knew that disappointed Mycroft even further. It was like having a third parent, one he didn't like.

Mycroft sighed. “Very well, then. Tell Mummy or I will,” he said then, knocking on the door to make the guard outside open it. “John's been taken to St. Bartholomew's, you may look for him there.”

“And my phone and coat?” Sherlock said coldly.

“Both will be returned to you as you leave the premises,” Mycroft stepped out and then gestured for Sherlock to do the same. “Sans everything you had in your pockets and the pictures you took.”

Sherlock swept out of the room and was escorted to the same small courtyard where they'd arrived. He was handed his things and let through the street gate. He knew exactly where he was, of course, and put on his coat, despite it being still damp and smelling quite horrid. He headed to the nearest tube stop, knowing full well that no cab would take him in this condition. He still intended to go home and have a shower, but was he then supposed to go see John? He was. Wasn't he? The socio-cultural script native to the UK concerning close family and friends and its sub-clause regarding romantic relationships dictated that he should.

His mobile battery was completely drained now so he had no chance to to check whether Lestrade had sent anything regarding the case with the locked room (which he now knew for certain had been a bait by Mycroft) and he also couldn't text Molly to ask whether she'd included the key found in the hand in her autopsy report. If she had, then Mycroft knew about it and knew that it was missing. Considering where Sherlock and John had been apprehended, Mycroft probably also had a pretty good idea of who was in possession of said key right now. However, he might not have known what it opened, which is why Sherlock needed to talk to Molly, to find out how she had described it in her report, if at all. It hadn't been in any of the preliminary work Molly had sent him the previous night because of obvious reasons.

Then an unrelated issue occurred to him. Was it customary to take a gift of some sort when one visited a hospital? Why were there so many rules? Sherlock's favourite question as a child had been 'why', mostly when it came to rules of conduct and social behaviour. Most of it had been (and remained) incomprehensible to Sherlock. He could, if pressed, act like a human, but he still didn't always understand why it was done.

A shower, a change of clothes, a reapplication of nicotine patches, a quick sweep through the flat to hide the original of the two books (so Mycroft's men hadn't been there yet), and a back-up mobile later (because not only was the battery empty, but it was now also very likely bugged by Mycroft) he was on the way to Barts. He swung by the pathology lab to see Molly, who looked tired and startled.

“Was the key in your report?” Sherlock asked and Molly jumped a little, dropping the pair of latex gloves she'd been putting on.

She turned to look at him. “Yes..?” Her face was very pale and her eyes very dark in the fluorescent lights of the lab.

“What were your exact words regarding it?”

She looked at him for a brief moment in askance, then realised Sherlock wasn't going to elaborate. “I described it's rough measurements and where it was found. About five centimetres in length, found in the anterior metacarpus of the severed hand, which in turn was located in the gullet of the deceased.”

Sherlock had sat on a saddle chair while Molly spoke and had begun idly propelling it around its axis, watching the familiar scenery of the lab swim by on each revolution. Of course the key was in the report. Molly was thorough. He was beginning to realise he wouldn't be able to solve this case (though realising that didn't make it any less palatable to swallow). There was nowhere to go except to Mycroft and that was a route Sherlock wasn't ready to consider. He should let this one go, shouldn't he? He and John were both safe. That was important, too. Wasn't it?

“Sorry?” Molly said then. Sherlock didn't stop pushing the chair around but looked at Molly when she crossed his field of vision. “You said something.”

“Why Lestrade?” Sherlock asked and kept turning on the chair.

“Because he asked,” Molly replied, fussing with some microscope slides. She spent a lot of time alone in the labs. And at home. Sherlock didn't know (care) much about her home life, it probably involved cats and cutesy things.

“Is that all? Not a very critical approach.” Then again, Molly had fancied Moriarty, she was clearly lacking in the critical department. Or she was just desperate.

“He thinks I'm lovely,” she said in a tone of voice that implied she didn't quite believe him. It wasn't surprising, her self-confidence wasn't the best. Then she turned and gave him a look. “You chose John because he said you were amazing. How is that any different?”

Sherlock stopped making the chair go around. He felt a bit nauseous and had to admit Molly had a point. He didn't say so but gave her a little nod of acknowledgement. She sometimes had insights, but unfortunately they were never about her.

“When the body arrived, what was it wearing?” Sherlock asked.

“Dirty underclothes. Vest and pants. I think it's all he was wearing when he left the hospital. When he was still alive. To eat that rat,” Molly replied, wrinkling her nose a little. She spent all day with corpses and corpse-related objects and considered a dead rat disgusting.

So nothing in his pockets. Then Sherlock frowned. He'd overlooked something and that annoyed him greatly. “Who admitted him? Quickly.” The last was aimed at Molly who was still sitting down and just looking at him.

He snapped his fingers towards the lab computer and Molly got up slowly and went to it, logging in with her credentials, at which point Sherlock pushed her aside and looked up the info himself. All the information about the polyphagic man's stay at Barts had obviously been removed and all physical artefacts he might have brought with him (clothes, ID and such) were undoubtedly now in Mycroft's possession.

He made a frustrated noise and smacked the desk with his palm, then spun away and stalked out of the lab. He'd let the case slip through his fingers (not that it was taken from him), but there had been no way he could've known that it was of interest to the _semper_ _occultus_ crowd. And yet he should have known, he should have guessed, he should have deduced it. It was an unacceptable lapse in judgement and logic and it was also _unfair_. Mycroft had far more resources and his own herd of tame spies to do his work for him.

Some elevators and corridors passed as he chewed on himself and then found himself in the same room as John. John had a heated blanket over him and was asleep so Sherlock went ahead and got into the bed with him. He had his back-up mobile to occupy him while John recovered. Lestrade had sent crime scene photos. But how disappointing. The man had not been murdered by a ghost but someone possibly outside his flat altogether. It was clear he had dragged himself into that room, locked himself in there and then died there from the wounds received somewhere else. Sherlock was typing a text when he heard something.

“-lock? Sherlock.”

“Yes, John,” he said without turning his gaze from his phone until the text was finished and sent. Then he pulled out a jar of jam from his (back-up) coat's pocket. “Here. Gifts are customary.”

“Oh, thank- This is the jam from home, Sherlock,” John sighed. “My jam. You brought me my own jam as a gift. Thoughtful.”

“You had my wallet and I didn't have time to go shopping,” Sherlock pointed out and turned to look at John. He had colour in his face (even with the hospital lights) and his fingers had been warm as he'd taken the jam jar.

“All things considered, the jam's probably one of the better things you could've brought,” John admitted. His voice was tired. It wasn't a surprise. Sherlock frowned. It wasn't particularly late but it had been a long day, part of which had been spent submerged in far too cold water. If Sherlock allowed himself he could also feel a weariness tugging on his bones and muscles, making the heated blanket and the bed very comfortable to lie on right now.

“What did you hear in the house?” he asked then. He'd been curious, but it hadn't been the time to ask about it earlier. He shifted so he could look at John without turning his head much. John's hands curled into fists when he asked that. Interesting.

“I'm tired,” John replied and closed his eyes, but didn't relax.

“Yes, and avoiding the question,” Sherlock said. He was staring at John's face, trying to bore into his head with his eyes. Epidermis, dermis, hypodermis, procerus muscle, periosteum, compact bone, endosteum-

“Crying,” John said, voice rather low and unwilling. “I heard crying.”

“Interesting. Elaborate.” Sherlock shifted a bit, physically indicating his interest in case John opened his eyes. He could read the minutiae of other people's body language, but he often forgot he also needed to emote physically. Mimicking body positions and gestures was a sign of openness and of being in sync (though it was usually done unconsciously). He was getting better at it though, possibly because he was often (enough) genuinely interested in John.

“Crying. As in sobbing. Weeping. Wailing,” John muttered.

“Those are synonyms, not elaboration.”

“Nothing to elaborate. That's what I heard. It was very close, too, so I called out in case someone else was trapped there, but there wasn't anyone. And then you came back.”

Sherlock leaned over him and kissed him on the mouth. He would continue to do that until John gave up. At least it clearly took his mind off the dark house as he opened his eyes and stared up at Sherlock. Then he lifted his hand and placed it on Sherlock's cheek and they kissed some more.

“Go home,” John said after a few more kisses, his hand still cupping the curve of Sherlock's jaw. “Or go solve a case. But stop bugging me. I want to sleep.”

“What about the customary fretting ritual performed at hospital bedsides?” Sherlock asked.

The corners of John's lips tilted up a little, amused. “Fretting ritual? Really?”

“I don't think you understand just how far our culture has ritualised social behaviour and ostracises those who refuse to follow the rules,” Sherlock said. He knew. He had plenty of experience of being ostracised because he asked 'why' instead of doing something just because it had been done that way before. But, and this he felt required extra acknowledgement from people around him, he was willing to make some compromises if it involved John.

“Guess I don't.” John shrugged a little and let his hand fall away from Sherlock's face. Sherlock felt ambivalent about this. On one hand he didn't like his face being touched, on the other... John.

“Cannibalism isn't illegal in the UK,” he said to cover up his ambivalent moment.

“Wow.” John rolled his eyes. “Still thinking about the polyphagic man?”

“He could've eaten someone. For me.” Sherlock remained very disappointed about that. He rested his head down on the pillow, but soon yanked it back up. “Why did Mycroft have the SIS take away his corpse and the autopsy reports? Why were they at the house? What _was_ in the house?” He was irritated about not having been able to look around properly. “Was it about the books he was making? Why? Was someone trying to hide the books by taking the key and the hand or was someone trying to reveal them by taking the key and the hand? How is the polyphagic man involved? Was the hand given to him or did he take it to eat? Was it a warning? To whom? Why the tattoos?”

“Why don't you ask Mycroft?” John said. Sherlock glared at him and then almost lunged out of the bed and the room. Clearly John didn't take this thing seriously enough. But he was also right. Not about asking Mycroft, but about the (unsaid) issue of not having a lot to go on. In fact, the only interesting thing that remained was John himself, which was often the case and which was why Sherlock didn't just leave.

“Why don't you admit you're attracted to me?” Sherlock snapped back, making John grunt and twist so he could glare at Sherlock.

“Might surprise you to find out I've not been attracted to a man before,” John said then, shuffling to sit up a little because he was uncomfortable with the topic change and lying down made him feel vulnerable (or this was how Sherlock interpreted his change of position).

“I fail to see the relevance,” Sherlock informed him immediately, sitting up as well.

“Of course you do,” John sighed.

“What part of me kissing you became unclear to you in the last three weeks?” Sherlock interrupted him. He kissed John again despite the protest noises from him. It took about two seconds to stop the protests that way. And to prove Sherlock's point because John kissed him back. He pulled away and smirked.

John licked his lips, looking up at him with a slightly nervous frown. “Fine,” he said somewhat hoarsely. “I'm attracted to you.”

“That's all I needed.” Sherlock nodded and settled back down, taking out his mobile to overview the texts Lestrade had sent him about looking for the murderer outside the locked room.

“You're in my bed. Again.” John said then, lying back down. It was true Sherlock had been visiting John's bed an inordinate amount in the last few days.

“Yep,” Sherlock replied somewhat absently.

“You did that to prove a point.”

“Yep,” Sherlock repeated, then lifted his gaze from his mobile and moved it to John who wasn't looking resentful or annoyed like he'd expected, just thoughtful. The overhead light wasn't on in the room, only a smaller lamp on the table by the bed. It cast a light that was quite dim, making the edges of light and shadow meld into each other, creating soft contours. John's hair was tousled and though he was frowning, the light quality made him look less severe than he probably wished. Despite not liking it when John's face told him off or chastised him, Sherlock adored his voluble expressions. Even the negative ones.

“Just to prove a point?” John raised his eyebrows a little.

Sherlock smiled crookedly, returning to his text messages. “Nope,” he said. Lestrade had sent more photos for him to look at, but he hardly paid attention to any, just flipped through them, feeling smug. Though the kisses he'd shared with John had been what he felt was quality work, he was also ready to go further with the quantity and the temporal aspects. As in, he wanted more of it more often.

“You really have no idea, do you?” John said after a moment, inhaling and exhaling deeply. He lay on his back with an arm behind his head, looking up at the ceiling. Sherlock was only halfway on the bed, with his legs over the edge, sharing John's pillow.

“Of?” Sherlock responded.

“Of how much I've struggled with this. You are... brilliant.” John hedged a little.

“But?” Sherlock turned his head to look at John's profile.

“But you're also routinely unpredictable.”

“Lovely oxymoron, John.” But true.

“If I trust you with this, will I regret it?” John turned his head as well and looked Sherlock in the eye. He was almost expressionless, which was very strange, except for the hint of worry around the corners of his mouth and eyes.

“Do you often regret your interactions with me?” Sherlock had assumed the answer was 'no' until now. He didn't regret anything involving John. It was horrible to consider that John might not share that conviction.

“Sometimes, sure,” John replied, making Sherlock's stomach lurch uncomfortably. Something in his face must've given up that sensation because John turned a little more and leaned over to kiss him softly. “Sorry,” he muttered then, as if on cue, but he remained close and spoke again: “I think you kissed me on a whim and that whim's going to end sooner or later.”

“Nothing lasts forever, John,” Sherlock said, attempting to let John get to his point at his own pace.

“Not a good thing to say right now.” John slumped back on the bed, one had rubbing at his forehead as he gave Sherlock a troubled look from under his brows.

“So you want some assurance that I'm committed to this. To you,” Sherlock deduced, concentrating on the issue at hand. This was a more difficult type of deduction. “I am, but I can't predict the future.”

John grimaced a little. “See, you almost had it and then you said something not good again,” he told him, but he was a little more relaxed. Perhaps the simple illocutionary act of promising he was committed to John had been enough. Communication was marvellous sometimes.

“Is future not typically discussed along with commitment?” Sherlock questioned.

“Yeah, I suppose.” John closed his eyes. “Just not typically with you.”

There was some quiet time after that because Sherlock was considering what had just been said. Simply promising to be committed was enough? Did John not realise how easy it was to lie? Not that Sherlock had been lying. He had actually been quite sincere. He also felt John relax next to him, possibly attempting to go back to sleep. Had the hour in the water really affected him that much or had he contracted an infection? Sherlock felt relatively fine, but then again, he lived off of ego-boosting and nicotine patches. And occasionally jam sandwiches.

“Mm, before I forget,” John said suddenly. “My things are in a paper bag under the bed. You should take a look. Those men weren't that observant when they went through my pockets. Must've been the smell and the fact I almost threw up on them.”

“I'm sure your keys and wallet are safe there,” Sherlock replied, not that interested.

“Not talking about those.” John elbowed him. “You should probably take it home. And bring me clean clothes tomorrow.”

It? Sherlock slipped his mobile into his pocket and slid off the bed where John made himself immediately comfortable, taking up as much space as possible to stop Sherlock from getting back in. Sherlock looked under the bed where John's filthy clothes were in one bag (he ignored that, he didn't do laundry) and his items in another. He pulled the item bag out and looked in, finding a piece of stiff parchment along with the aforementioned keys and wallet (and useless phone).

He took out the parchment which had faded writing on it. Symbols, like in the manuscripts, but also corresponding Latin abecedary and Western Arabic numerals. Then it dawned on Sherlock and he broke into a giant grin, leaving the rest of John's things in the bag which he kicked back under the bed.

“John,” he said, absolutely elated. “It's a key. A translation key. Do you know what you've done?” Sherlock leaned over him and kissed him again, briefly cupping his cheek. “John,” he breathed, resting their foreheads together. “You are brilliant.”

“You're welcome,” John replied, opening his eyes a fraction and smiling up at Sherlock. Then he planted his hand on Sherlock's chest and gave him a little push. “Now fuck off.”

Sherlock grinned and stood up, carefully folding the parchment into a pocket in the lining of his coat. He'd be happy to give John all the rest he wanted in exchange for this. “Fine,” he said. “We'll pick this up when you come back.”

“Promises,” John murmured, eyes closed again. He still smiled and his face was peaceful and clean of lines.

Sherlock placed the back of his fingers against John's cheek in a brief gesture of thanks before leaving the room. John had made everything worthwhile with one simple—but not insignificant—deed.


End file.
